"Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet" by Harold L. Goodwin is a young adult science fiction novel published in 1952. Freshly commissioned Lieutenant Rip Foster must navigate inter-service rivalry while undertaking a dangerous mission: retrieve a pure thorium asteroid from the asteroid belt and bring it to Earth. But he's not alone in this quest. Enemy agents from the Consolidation of Peoples Governments will stop at nothing to seize control of this valuable resource first. (This is an automatically generated summary.)