Rocket Girl
Rocket Girl
George D. Morgan
The year is 1957. The Cold War. An undeclared Space Race. The United States and the Soviet Union are locked in a battle to see which country will be the first to place a satellite into orbit.
The stakes are high. International prestige, national pride, and the control of a host of emerging technologies are on the line. As America’s Vanguard rocket program proves itself a disastrous failure, and word leaks out that the Soviets are close to making their first orbital attempt, U.S. politicians have no choice but to abandon the Vanguard.
Hat-in-hand they approach Dr. Wernher von Braun and plead for help. But when von Braun realizes that his rocket – the Redstone/Jupiter C – will not be powerful enough to reach orbit, he seeks out the help of a young woman in California who may hold the key to putting America back in the Space Race.
Born on a small farm in Ray, North Dakota, and recruited as a wartime chemist for the U.S. Government after only one year of college, Mary Sherman suddenly finds herself at the center of a political and technological maelstrom.
“Rocket Girl” is the heretofore untold story of how a poor farm girl with only a high school diploma not only rose to become America’s first female rocket scientist, but provided the crucial technology that launched America into the Age of Space.
Available
2018
978-1-72760-288-3
Drama
Edição de autor/Author’s edition
George D. Morgan
George D. Morgan, son of Mary Sherman Morgan, inventor of the rocket fuel Hydyne, which powered the rocket that boosted the United States’ first satellite, is an acclaimed author, playwright and screenwriter. He received his B.A. in Creative Writing from the California State University Channel Islands, and his M.F.A. in Performative Writing from the University Of California, Riverside, in the Palm Desert Writing Program. He’s the author of a dozen plays and musicals, including “Second to Die”, “Nevada Belle”, and “Thunder in the Valley”. Most importantly, he’s also the author of “Rocket Girl”, a play based on the life of the first American rocket scientist (his mother, Mary Sherman Morgan), which premiered in 2008 at Caltech, where he is a resident playwright. This was the first of a trilogy of science-themed plays, the second one being “Pasadena Babylon”, which premiered in 2010 and was a semi-finalist of the Sundance Institute’s Alfred P. Sloan Prize. The trilogy ends with “Capture the Sun”, a play that addresses the 1989 controversy around Stanley Pons, Martin Fleischmann, and the cold fusion. Morgan is an active member of both the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America.
More information: georgedmorgan.com, csuci.edu, publishersweekly.com, newcanaanlibrary.org and en.wikipedia.org