Starman Jones Audiobook (Free)

The stars were closed to Utmost Jones. To find yourself in space you either needed connections, a membership in the arcane Guild, or a whole lot more cash than Utmost, the son of the widowed, poor mom, was ever likely to have. What Max does have going for him are his uncle’s prized astrogation manuals-books on celebrity navigation that Max actually commits to storage word after word, equation for equation. When Max’s mom chooses to remarry a bullying oaf, Potential takes to the street, only to find that his uncle about Starman Jones Chet’s manuals, and Max’s near complete memorization of these, is a ticket to the stars. But serving on a spaceship is certainly no easy task. Duty is definitely everything, and a mistake often means you and all aboard are lost forever. Max adores every minute of his new lease of life, and he gradually expands in the trust of his superior officers. He seems to be on course for a command word track position-but then disaster attacks, and it’s likely to take every trick Utmost ever discovered from his challenging existence and his uncle’s manuals to save himself and the ship from a doom beyond extinction itself.

From your First Golden Age of Heinlein, this is the so-called juvenile (written, Heinlein always claims, just as much for adults) that started them all and produced Heinlein a star for multiple generations of visitors.