Interplanetary Flight An Introduction To Astronautics.

Clarke’s first book of nonfiction, written while he was assistant secretary of the British Interplanetary Society. In the Preface he states this is the first English-language book to develop the theory of astronautics in any detail, deliberately taking the astronomer’s rather than the engineer’s approach and relegating the mathematics to an appendix, and thanks A. V. Cleaver for critically reading the manuscript.

Chapters work through escape by rocket, the Earth-Moon journey, interplanetary flight proper, and the atomic rocket, including the solid- and gaseous-core nuclear reactor schemes that Cleaver and L. R. Shepherd had proposed as an alternative to chemical propellants. The plates illustrate the BIS’s 1949 multi-stage “expendable” spaceship design and H. E. Ross and R. A. Smith’s rotating wheel space station, early technical concepts that anticipated the space-station imagery later popularized by the von Braun/Collier’s series and, eventually, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

First printing, with the dust jacket showing “B.Sc.” after Clarke’s name; later printings would add his FRAS title. The book belongs to Temple Press’s Technical Trends Series and carries fifteen plates plus a frontispiece, a U.S. Navy photograph of the Earth from a height of 57 miles.