Flight Into Universal Space.

Sternfeld’s popular introduction to cosmonautics, Polyot v mirovoe prostranstvo, published by the State Publishing House of Technical and Theoretical Literature, Moscow-Leningrad, 1949. The verso credits the drawings to the artist N. M. Kolchitsky, made from Sternfeld’s own sketches and instructions, with G. A. Volpert as editor, and the book was sent to press on 31 May 1949. The French edition (1954), Le Vol dans l’espace cosmique, is also in the collection.

The short preface sets out the aim: a brief survey of the state of cosmonautics for a wide readership, with the mathematics left out and Tsiolkovsky, Zander, Kondratyuk and Sternfeld’s own 1937 Introduction to Cosmonautics recommended for those who want the calculations. Thirteen chapters follow, from “The Eternally Young Dream of Mankind” and the passage through the atmosphere, through heavy gravity and weightlessness, the path from utopia to the science of space flight, the history of the rocket and its uses on Earth, the stratospheric and cosmic rocket, and life aboard a spaceship, to interplanetary flights, signalling across space, “Toward the Constellation Centaurus,” and a closing chapter titled “Yesterday’s Utopia — Tomorrow’s Reality.”

Line drawings and half-tone illustrations are set in the text, including diagrams of orbits and a table of planetary data. The front cover shows a spaceship passing nebulae on a blue-black ground.