Farmer in the Sky

Farmer in the Sky came out in 1950, one of the novels Heinlein wrote for younger readers. A condensed version ran in Boys' Life across four issues that year as Satellite Scout, and the book was given a Retro Hugo in 2001.

The Earth of the novel is overcrowded, and food is rationed carefully. William Lermer, known as Bill, lives with his widowed father George, and when George decides to take the family out to the farming colony on Ganymede he takes his son with him; after his marriage to Molly Kenyon the household also includes her daughter Peggy.

The four of them travel on the torchship Mayflower, and the voyage is not uneventful: when a meteor strike puts his bunkmates in danger, Bill improvises a patch and saves them from suffocating. The novel is partly an adventure of that kind and partly an account of what it takes to turn a new world into a farm, and it has been read as one of the books in which Heinlein worked out his ideas about colonies and settlement.