L’Astronautica.

A 160-page special number issued as a supplement to no. 50 of the Rome popular-science monthly Scienza e Vita and edited by Ignazio Contu, with contributions by Alexandre Ananoff and a group of French and Italian astronomers and engineers. Its preface argues that space travel has moved from speculation to engineering thanks to the wartime progress of rockets, predicts a lunar expedition within a generation and an artificial satellite within 10 to 15 years, and notes that astronautics has already held three international congresses.

The chapters cover extraterrestrial journeys and the solar system, the history of astronautics from Daedalus and Icarus through Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth and Valier, conditions in interplanetary space, the Moon and planets, a thousand years of rocket history from the V-2 and the American WAC Corporal to multi-stage rockets and an Italian rocket association, rocket propulsion and fuels, a nuclear-powered spaceship, whether people can live aboard a space vessel (with a cutaway cabin drawn after Ananoff), and artificial satellites. It is lavishly illustrated with drawings, diagrams and photographs, and its cover shows spacesuited explorers on the Moon beside a landed rocket.

Also in the collection: Ananoff’s L’Astronautica (Garzanti, 1952).