Die Möglichkeit Der Weltraumfahrt.

An anthology assembled by Willy Ley, who explains in his February 1928 preface that he spent nine months soliciting contributions from the leading German-language writers on spaceflight; Max Valier had agreed to take part but had to withdraw, overburdened with other work. The seven contributors it did secure — Hermann Oberth, Franz von Hoefft, Walter Hohmann, Karl Debus, Guido von Pirquet, and Fr. W. Sander, alongside Ley’s own two opening chapters — amounted to a roll call of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt’s core theorists.

Karl Debus contributes a long literary-historical survey, “Raumschiffahrtsdichtung und Bewohnbarkeitsphantasien seit der Renaissance bis heute,” tracing space-travel and other-worlds fiction from Dante and Kepler’s Somnium through Cyrano de Bergerac, Athanasius Kircher, Godwin, Huygens, and Voltaire to Poe, Verne, Flammarion, Wells, Lasswitz, and contemporaries such as Bürgel, Hans Dominik, and Max Valier’s own Mars story — with running commentary on the Schiaparelli–Lowell canal debate and the socialist and utopian undercurrents of the genre.

Hermann Oberth supplies two chapters: “Grundprobleme der Raumschiffahrt” derives the rocket’s recoil principle and the exhaust-velocity/mass-ratio equation from first principles, with tables of the propellant mass required for a given velocity gain and a discussion of the atmosphere-limited “most favorable” ascent speed; the later “Stationen im Weltraum” takes up the habitable space station — artificial gravity by centrifugal spin, the physiological and psychological effects of weightlessness, and space telescopes freed from atmospheric distortion, a companion piece to Hermann Noordung’s book published the following year (also in this collection). Walter Hohmann’s “Fahrtrouten, Fahrzeiten und Landungsmöglichkeiten” applies the transfer-orbit theory of his 1925 Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (also in this collection) to worked round-trip examples — Earth to Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter, with fuel-mass and flight-time tables and a proposal to use the Moon as a refueling base to cut the mass that must be lifted from Earth.

Two exemplars in the collection.