This is one of the SF "juveniles" that Heinlein used to produce once a year in the 1950s, just in time for Xmas shopping. He once claimed that the editor who bought these things did not particularly like his writing, but kept publishing them because she had discovered that enough other people liked them to keep her department out of the red. The really sad thing is in the last quarter-century or so of his career he abandoned "juvenile" SF for other, more mature works, and yet when I recently reread this one (probably for the eighth or ninth time) I still found it more enjoyable than most of the supposedly new-and-improved types of SF novels I've looked at over the past decade or so.

Of course, part of that is because of Heinlein's distinctive style, particularly (in my opinion) when writing in the first person, as he did here. His narrators are usually quick-witted and well-read, referring to a variety of sources from modern and classical literature when it seems appropriate. On the other hand, they tend to have a sense of humor regarding their own shortcomings, rather than expecting us to fall down on our knees and worship them as demigods. And part of it was that since these books were intended to be readily accessible to any teenager with a certain interest in scientific matters, he made sure he kept things moving quickly and explaining clearly whatever needed to be explained, as opposed to expecting you to read several pages of Glossary at the back defining all the technical terms which the writer invented for the occasion.

It's a classic story of wish fulfillment. "What if my dream came true?" Kip Russell is your typical red-blooded American boy living in a small town somewhere in the USA (somewhere Midwestern, I assumed, but it's pretty vague) who wants to go to the Moon someday. No specific dates are given in the story, but it's set sometime after at least one small permanent city and some military installations have been placed on the Lunar surface, so traveling there is indeed possible if you can convince the world government that you are the best qualified man for a job opening they have up there. Alternately if you're willing to pay an astronomical fee to go as a tourist, but Kip isn't wealthy.

The Skyway Soap Company is holding a promotional contest. The person who submits the best new slogan for their soap will win an all-expense-paid trip to the Moon! Kip valiantly enters several thousand slogans before the deadline, but fails to take the grand prize. Instead, he gets one of the lesser prizes - a genuine spacesuit, already having been used in the construction of one of the space stations, complete with owner's manual. Hence the title of the story. A local (self-appointed) wit makes a joke about how Kip could take out an ad offering to be a genuine space hero for anyone who needs one in a hurry: "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel!" and so forth. Kip doesn't take out such an ad, but oddly enough the suggestion came closer to being a prophecy than anyone realized at the time.

Kip spends the summer following his high school graduation working hard on overhauling, refurbishing, and generally sprucing up his spacesuit so that it will be in full working order, absolutely airtight (some of the rubber gaskets and such were showing their age) and ready for action at a moment's notice. There is no practical reason to do this; he just wants to. So far it's a nice wholesome story that feels as if it could easily be happening in the USA of the 1950s, except for the bit about men having already been to the Moon, which was only a faroff dream at the time Heinlein worked on this.

Then Kip is out walking in a field in his suit, testing the radio and so forth, when someone suddenly starts demanding he keep talking and guide them down for a landing, right now! Darned if it ain't a flying saucer coming down of the blue! Two of them, actually - the second one was chasing the first one, which he stayed in contact with to help the pilot (a twelve-year-old girl) make her touchdown safely. Occupants of the second saucer knock him unconscious, and when he wakes up, he's locked in a room with the twelve-year-old girl, who swears they are probably almost halfway to the Moon by now. They've been captured by space pirates, she says. He expresses profound skepticism that such things could exist. She shrugs. "They operate in space and their actions are piratical - you name them."

Before the story is over, he has used his spacesuit on the Moon and on the surface of one of our other planets, rubbed shoulders with members of extraterrestrial civilizations, and possibly saved the world (although he feels there is room for doubt on that score). He has also acquired some vehement opinions on how modern spacesuit designs could be drastically improved in several ways to avoid some of the very inconvenient problems he ran into trying to do tricky tasks under field conditions, and we can entertain hopes that after he gets his engineering degree he'll be able to put his ideas into practice.

The story is definitely optimistic in tone, despite Kip's occasional fears that he's about to asphyxiate, freeze to death, or otherwise come to a bad end. It's hard to believe that when Heinlein wrote this, the first artifical satellite (Sputnik) had just recently happened and the term "space program" was still more imaginary than real, and no one really knew when or if humans would actually walk on the moon. I've read claims that many of the young men of the mid-20th Century who grew up to become NASA scientists in the 60s and 70s were at least partially inspired by having read Heinlein's novels in the 50s, including this one, and I can believe it although I haven't seen any hard figures showing it was proved in an extensive survey.

Recommended: Yes