Interplanetary Travels.

The seventh edition, “newly reworked and expanded,” of Perelman’s popular account of rocket flight and starflight; the first edition appeared in 1915. The subtitle reads Fundamentals of Rocket Flight and Starflight. In his preface Perelman notes that a jet-propulsion research group had been formed in 1931 under the Air Technology Bureau of Osoaviakhim and that a state institute of rocket flight was under discussion, and he says the book now draws on first-hand sources and his correspondence with rocket workers abroad. It also reprints Tsiolkovsky’s preface to the sixth edition, in which Tsiolkovsky recalls how his 1903 paper went unnoticed and credits Perelman’s 1915 book as the first serious yet accessible work on interplanetary flight.

Twenty chapters (pp. 7–120) move from gravitation and the cannon-to-the-Moon idea (theory and practice, pp. 25–38) through the gunpowder rocket and its history, Kibalchich’s flying-machine project (p. 55), the energy and mechanics of rocket flight, stellar navigation, Tsiolkovsky’s projects, an artificial Moon and extraterrestrial station, experiments with new rockets, life aboard a spaceship, and the dangers of starflight. Twelve appendices (pp. 121–173) cover rocket dynamics, initial velocities and flight times, a rocket across the ocean, a rocket to the Moon, interplanetary signaling, a reading list, and a chronology of rocketry through 1931. Illustrated with line drawings, including portraits of Verne and Kibalchich.

Chapters VI and VII test Verne’s cannon-projectile as engineering, and a footnote cites a Russian edition of Verne’s two Moon novels edited and annotated by Perelman and published in 1928 by Zemlya i Fabrika; the 1934 Verne edition in this collection is a later one. The tenth edition (1935) is also in the collection. Print run 15,000, approved for printing 15 May 1932.