Under the editorial gaze of Alice Dalgliesh, the book reached the shelves in 1947 as Rocket Ship Galileo. The book, Heinlein's first book-length SF effort, was a hit. Kids read it, libraries bought it, and in February of 1948 Heinlein's agent told him that there was no danger of Scribner's turning down the follow-up book, Space Cadet. Even for an editor, Alice Dalgliesh was an odd duck. That's not so unusual.
Editors do that all the time, probably because they enjoy driving writers crazy.
What made Alice Dalgliesh so eccentric were the things she wanted changed. Heinlein was angry, not least because he had put considerable research and mathematical effort into the planet's conditions. Dalgliesh was also obsessed with possible sexual elements in Heinlein's books for the young and impressionable. She was convinced that the character Willis, a young Martian adopted by Red Planet 's hero, had Freudian sexual connotations. Both Heinlein and his agent were mystified by this, but the writer consciously avoided sexual imagery in later books for Scribner's.