Kleine Raketenkunde.

Volume 5 of the Mundus-Verlag series Quellen des Wissens, printed in October 1949 with 91 illustrations and a jacket by Hermann Schübel. The Introduction recalls that the first reports of German rocket achievements surfaced only in the last year of WWII and were quickly veiled again; the book aims to explain the principles of rocket technology, trace the rocket’s history to the present, and show what further development might bring. A frontispiece portrait of Hermann Oberth is accompanied by an epigraph from him on the inventor’s path.

After a short history of the rocket and a chapter on how it works, including a vision of the voyage into space, the book describes the start of scientific rocket research in 1920–1930: Goddard, Oberth, other theorists in Germany and Austria, powder-rocket experiments, liquid-fuel rockets, foreign work and Eugen Sänger’s research. The modern development then covers powder rockets, Germany’s large rockets of the second world war and the latest developments abroad, followed by present and future tasks, an annotated bibliography of books in German, English, French and Russian (plus novels and films), a small rocket lexicon, and name and subject indexes. Two exemplars in the collection.