Astronáutica.

Full title Astronautica (Teoría de los viajes extra-terrestres), by Ernesto Mayer C., identified on the title page as Ingeniero Coordinador of the Sociedad Interplanetaria Chilena. Copyright 1956 (registration no. 16802). The cover is a stark black-and-white rocket against a star field, with a red exhaust. The Introduction says the aim is to trace, simply and clearly, the road from the stammerings of mythology to current research related to astronautics, with mathematics kept to a minimum for the general reader.

The book is organized in four parts: the stages of the new science (pre-astronautics, precursors, the birth of the astronautical era, and its development); extraterrestrial voyages (dominion of the solar system, escape from the Earth, artificial satellites, and weightlessness in free orbit); rocket thrust outside the atmosphere (the action principle, mass ratio, the step rocket, nuclear energy, and fuels and exhaust velocities); and cosmic voyages. The last covers the interest of an artificial satellite, biological effects of cosmic rays and weightlessness, satellite mechanics, the Ross and Smith and von Braun satellites, voyages to the Moon and planets, meteorites and interstellar flight.

Twenty-seven figures include a human centrifuge, the Ross and Smith satellite, a pressurized-suit astronaut, and von Braun’s three-stage transport rocket, with tables of the solar system and propellants. An Appendix discusses flying saucers (the 1947 Kenneth Arnold case, the 1948 Mantell case, astronomers’ sightings) and life on other worlds, followed by a bibliography that includes Esnault-Pelterie, Oberth and Gougerot. Compare the 1954 Argentine Astronáutica by José Mateo in this catalog.