Flight Perilous!

The year is 1957. The Cold War is heating up, and so is the race to Mars. Captain Fred Hiller commands the Marship III on humanity's most daring voyage yet, a mission to reach the Red Planet. But when the ship plows into an uncharted asteroid belt, survival becomes a calculus of impossible choices. Every fragment of rock could be their last. The crew looks to Hiller to weigh their lives against the mission's legacy. Is courage continuing forward, or is it knowing when to turn back? This is space fiction at its most primal: man against the void, with no margin for error. Noll writes with the tense, mechanical precision of an era that believed the stars were within reach and the cost of reaching them was everything. For readers who grew up dreaming of rocket ships and wonder what it felt like to imagine Mars when it was still impossible.