"Requiem" by Robert A. Heinlein (1940), maybe? Reads as a sequel to his book, The Man Who Sold the Moon, but was actually published before it.
The story centers around Delos David Harriman, the lead character of
"The Man Who Sold the Moon". Harriman, a tycoon and latter-day robber
baron, had always dreamed of going to the Moon, and had spent much of
his career and resources making space flight a practical commercial
enterprise. Unfortunately, his business partners prevented him from
taking the early flights because they could not risk the public face
of their company. Now an old man, Harriman has still not been to the
Moon, a fact that frustrates him, since he lives in a world where
space travel is so commonplace that carnivals have their own
barnstorming spacecraft. Although no longer bound by his contractual
obligations, he is now too old to pass the medical examination needed
for space travel.
Very wealthy, Harriman bribes two spacemen to help him get to the Moon
after encountering them at a funfair in Butler, a small town outside
Kansas City, Missouri (Heinlein's birthplace), where they sell rides
on their old, somewhat run-down ship.
The three of them fight many obstacles, including Harriman's heirs,
who want him declared mentally incompetent or senile before he can
spend their inheritance. In the end, Harriman finally makes it to the
Moon, only to die on the surface soon after landing, content at
finally having reached his goal. His body is left there, with his
epitaph scrawled on the tag from an oxygen bottle. It is Robert Louis
Stevenson's "Requiem", which is inscribed on his own headstone in
Samoa.
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will!
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
