Flight To The Moon.

A popular-science anthology told as fiction: the first Moon flight, launched on 25 November 1974. The frontispiece reproduces a mock front page of Izvestia, Pravda and Komsomolskaya Pravda for Tuesday 26 November 1974, announcing the launch of the ship “Luna-1” from the Caucasus with a crew of four. The title page calls the book Earth–Moon 1974, Collection One and ascribes the editing to the chairman of an “Interplanetary Committee,” Prof. V. N. Khomenko. The publisher’s note says the material was taken from the journal Znanie—sila No. 10 for 1954, with articles by K. Gilzin, Yu. Khlebtsevich, V. Levin, L. Orlov, Yu. Stepanov, I. Fridman, G. Gurevich, Yu. Dolgushin, B. Liapunov and M. Popovsky, and an afterword by N. Varvarov.

Three parts follow the flight: “Difficulties Behind” (the birth of astronautics, radio-controlled rockets, the atomic engine, the ship on the pad), “Between Earth and the Moon” (the trajectory, weightlessness, radio and electronic helpers) and “On the Moon,” which includes Liapunov’s “The First Hour on the Moon.” Illustrated by Yu. P. Rebrov, in the Fantastika. Priklyucheniya series; approved for press 16 September 1955 in an edition of 90,000 copies.

The collection holds two copies with the same colophon, but the second copy’s title page is dated 1956 where the first is dated 1955. Its contents page also corrects the introduction to page 3, where the first copy prints page 11, and its back cover is grey-green paper rather than beige. Liapunov’s Discovering the World (1954) is also in the collection.