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seeking book
I've a vague memory of a book I read back in primary school - that would be twenty years ago plus change - which I am having trouble recalling useful details of, such as author or title. If you can help, I'd appreciate it. The book concerns a school kid who wins a prize, in a quiz if I recall correctly. The prize is a trip into space. Events in the book include hanging out with the guy who first landed on Mars (I think; hopefully this isn't a confusion with a William Gibson short story), where he met some sort of alien life form; travelling around the far side of the moon, getting refuelled from "the Hipparchus Launcher" - a maglev railgun used to hurl cargo into lunar orbit - and finding an abandoned canister with a skull and crossbones on it floating out in space. If any of this rings a bell with you, lemme know. The only useful phrase from the book I can remember is "Hipparchus Launcher" and that's drawing a blank on Amazon and Google, which is hardly surprising for a book that's over twenty years old and probably not up there with the classics of SciFi.
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Assuming that to be the case, the guy he meets (who runs the space station) was on the first mission to Mercury, and lost his legs in an encounter with said lifeform. The book is often credited with introducing the concept of the geostationary orbit, although his telecom satellites had lots of human operators. Still, it had some pretty nifty ideas, for a book written before Sputnik was launched...
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