Kittinger certainly had the Right Stuff, as did those who ultimately went to the moon on board Apollo 11 — forty years ago this week. At the time I wrote this story (sometime in summer 2007), Apollo’s legacy seemed to be being squandered: the picture being painted was of drunken and occasionally lunatic astronauts being shot infrequently into space using dangerous, vulnerable and expensive technology to accomplish missions that offered little by way of useful knowledge and still less by way of inspiration.

Some of that picture turned out to be unfair or misleading, and things look brighter now, but it still seems more likely to me that it’ll be private enterprise, not public spirit, that will drive the human race to conquer the high frontier (never mind the final one). That in turn suggests there will be fewer giant leaps for mankind and more jollies for the ultra-wealthy. In fact, something akin to the space-diving scenario that’s outlined in this story showed up in the press a few months later, billed as the ultimate extreme sport. And speaking of the final frontier, it made an appearance in the new Star Trek movie too.

Not that any of this was at the forefront of my mind when I sat down to write this piece at my
writing group – in fact, I had little idea what I was going to write about at all, and this story just seemed to arrive fully-formed. The only thing I had was an impression of what it might be like to ride a rocket (possibly inspired by a couple of YouTube videos from the point of view of a Shuttle Booster – thanks, Will!) The following Saturday, I went to see the London leg of the Red Bull Air Race, in which light planes flew a challenging, low-level course over the Thames – a return to magnificent men in their flying machines. I think the inspiration for this story somehow travelled backwards in time.

The title is a nod to King of the Rocket Men, an old-school black-and-white serial that I was thrilled by as a child. Even then, its jetpack-toting brand of adventure was wildly antiquated– the show was already thirty years old when I first saw it – but there’s something enduringly delightful about the combination of euphoric flight and derring-do. The rocketman motif has been revisited in a spirit of bittersweet nostalgia a few times since, but my favourite take on the concept is in Ex Machina, a superb comic described by its writer Brian K Vaughn as “The West Wing meets Unbreakable“.

How many times has Sumit been King of the rocket men and who of the twelve were you thinking of when you wrote this?

Your story completes the unanswered questions from childhood games and adult meanderings. On the beach yesterday, watching the red arrows slicing and swirling though the sky gave me a similar gut-tightening excitement. The writing is – characteristically – very tactile.

Structurally truthful – does that make sense? – I mean that you haven’t just written a story but have created a time and place for it to unquestionably come into existence in “the tiny hiatus” and “the silent pause”. Clever and subtle. The reader and protagonist share a moment and paragraph two provides the pre-roller-coaster awareness needed to build anticipation.

I’m disorientated and dizzied by paragraph four with the sensation of falling at great speed yet movements “forced” and “twisting” in an almost cumbersome slowmotion. Great effect of reader tension contrasting with protagonist enjoyment.

I particularly love the image; “The deep black was inviting, its stillness that of a familiar room at rest” and the way that paragraph eight continues to explore the compelling and simplifying quality of distance.

Looking now, I’m finding it hard to pinpoint exactly where my concern for the rocketman becomes more complicated, certainly before the poignancy of “always the sneaking fear that he might have played such an inconsequential part as to be forgotten altogether: he feared the indignity more than the danger”. Perhaps from the insistence of the protagonist in holding so tightly to his own childhood dream as “rocketboy” and the incongruity of a self-view so precarious belonging to a time of heroes and tickertape parades.

The writing seems to mimic the visual display of the rocketman’s finish and it is with applause he ends on an upward thrust of affirmation of his life. Hooray! He IS the King!