Survey Ship - Paperback

How do you make a spaceman?You start the same way that you start to make a chess master, a ballet dancer, a trapeze performer, or any other difficult and complex task demanding highly trained and concentrated skills, physical or mental; you start when the future professionals are too young to know whether that is what they want out of life, or not. United Nations Expeditionary Planetary Survey-UNEPS-starts every year with one hundred five-year-olds, discovered, in early testing, to be both mentally and physically superior. Twelve years later the best graduates of the Academy are given a Ship and sent out to find habitable planets for humans to live on. But what happens to a small crew of teenagers once the Ship leaves Earth?