Discovering The World.

A popular-science book for young readers on spaceflight and the planets. The unsigned preface presents it as a book that teaches the reader to dream the way Tsiolkovsky did, with fantasy checked by scientific calculation, and contrasts Soviet optimism with the pessimism of Western writers such as Wells. Twenty-eight short chapters fall into six parts: the Earth’s hold (rocket trains, energy sources, atomic power), high-altitude research and stratospheric jumps, rocket flight (acceleration, weightlessness, the three dangers, the spacesuit, radio waves), the artificial satellite and space station, the Moon, Mars, Venus and the giant and dwarf stars, and the road to the stars. A bibliography of popular literature closes the book, listing Liapunov’s own Stories About Rockets and Kooy and Uytenbogaart’s Dynamics of Rockets, both in this collection.

Illustrated with seven color plates and black-and-white text drawings; cover and plates by N. Grishin, text drawings by Grishin and V. Noskov, edited by V. Pekelis. Approved for press 15 October 1954, in an edition of 90,000 copies.

The second edition (1956) is also in the collection. It reprints the first edition’s text and illustrators, with the same chapters, and contents references that run one page later in three places. It was approved for press on 3 January 1956 in 75,000 copies, noted as printed from matrices, and its acknowledgments page now calls M. K. Tikhonravov an engineer-colonel where the first edition names him a candidate of technical sciences. Liapunov’s earlier Rocket (1948, Catalog C) and Rockets (1950) are also here.