- Year
- 1933
- By
- Mikoni, K.S.
- Published
- Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia.
- Edition
- Russian. First edition, softcover.
- Ciancone
- R36.
- Shelf
- R6
- Catalog
- Catalog A · Early Pioneers
The colophon records this printing as sent to typesetting 14 April 1933 and approved for press 2 July 1933, a run of 10,000 copies, with no reference to an earlier edition — so this appears to be a first edition rather than a reprint.
It's a popular survey rather than a technical work: a history of the rocket from the Chinese fire-arrow through Congreve's war rockets to 1930s rocket cars, a dramatized account of Nikolai Kibalchich awaiting execution in a tsarist prison cell in 1881, anxiously asking his lawyer whether specialists had yet reviewed the rocket-powered flying machine he had designed there (he was executed without ever learning its fate), a biographical sketch of Tsiolkovsky's years as a schoolteacher in Kaluga, summaries of Esnault-Pelterie's and Oberth's spaceflight calculations, and an account of Max Valier's Opel-Sander rocket car and railcar trials of 1928. It closes with a short science-fiction epilogue imagining a time traveler's visit to a future communist society that has spread through the solar system.
No original research here, but a solidly illustrated period popularization.