Rocketry - Jets And Rockets.

Lent’s second rocket book, following Rocket Research (1945), and by the jacket’s account a much more advanced work, written because the science had moved quickly since the end of the war. The title page gives the subtitle The Science of the Reaction Motor and its Practical Application for Aircraft and Space Travel, with the imprint “Published and Distributed by Pen-Ink Publishing Co., 130 West 42nd Street, New York 18, N.Y.” and a copyright date of 1947. The Foreword complains that earlier rocket books were mostly narrative, science fiction and Buck Rogers cartoons with little technical value, and that an author must be engineer, draftsman and artist at once. The jacket carries a portrait of Lent and lists his other books, including Food Enough for All and Practical Machine Design and Drafting, and notes he edited Rocket-Jet Flying.

Ten chapters run from “The Science of Rocketry,” “The Rocket and Its Motor” and “Rocket Flying” through “The Thermal-Jet Motor” and “Thermal-Jet Flying” to “Is Interplanetary Navigation Possible?” and “Interstellar Rocketways,” the latter two illustrated with plates of nebulae and galaxies. Chapter VIII, “The War Rocket and Its Future,” covers the German V-weapons, the American bazooka, vehicle-mounted rocket launchers, aircraft rocket installations and rocket batteries, with photographs and line drawings. The last chapters are “Rocketor’s Workshop,” a practical section for amateurs, and “The Atom, the Rocket and the United Nations.”

A distinctive appendix, “Index and List of Rocket and Jet Patents and Rocket Societies,” tabulates American and British rocket patents, many of them Goddard’s, and lists rocket societies worldwide with their founding dates. Lent’s earlier Rocket Research is in Catalog B; this is the postwar, more ambitious survey, richly illustrated.