The Pilgrim Project by Hank SEARLS (1965)

The Pilgrim Project is a fictional account of the first landing on the Moon. But this is not an Apollo mission. According to the novel's foreword, at a symposium in New York in 1962, members of the Institute of Aerospace Sciences proposed sending an astronaut on a one-way trip to the Moon. He would have to survive there for about a year, while NASA figured out how to rescue him. The plan was never taken seriously, and work moved on apace on the Apollo programme.

Searls did well get his novel out so quickly. The Pilgrim Project is copyrighted 1964, so he must have started writing it shortly after the symposium mentioned above. Unfortunately, future events have made an alternate history of the story. For example, the novel opens with the crew of Apollo 3 in orbit. The year isn't given, but I'd guess it was roughly contemporaneous with the book's publication, so the mid-1960s. Sadly, the Apollo 1 fire, in which Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White lost their lives, delayed Apollo, and the first manned flight wasn't until Apollo 7 on 11 October 1968.

See the rest of the review at http://spacebookspace.blogspot.com/2009/06/pilgrim-project-hank-searls.html ( )