Raketenflug Ins Weltall.

A popular but technically grounded account of the road to the planets, subtitled Die Eroberung des Universums durch den Menschen, “with 150 pictures in the text and on 16 plates.” The book is dedicated to Hermann Oberth “in cordial veneration” and opens with a Faust epigraph; the preface is dated Munich, November 1952, and the copyright page gives 1952, with jacket and binding by B. and R. von Römer, text drawings by Günther Burgfeld, Heinz Gellert, Julius Schmidt and Erich Schülzke, and printing by G. Franz’sche Buchdruckerei G. Emil Mayer. The jacket flap singles out von Braun’s Mars project as the kind of discussion the lay reader wants to follow on a factual footing.

The first part, “Die Grundlagen,” teaches the physics through questions: how to build an artificial moon, Kepler ellipses, weightlessness and artificial gravity, friction, and why Jules Verne’s gun-fired passengers would not survive. A section on curious launchers revisits the solenoid gun, the pneumatic-tube plan and Ulinski’s electron rocket, all also treated in Linke’s 1928 Das Raketen-Weltraumschiff (Catalog A). Conic sections, escape velocity, the path of a moon rocket, and the biological effects of acceleration follow.

“Die Rakete” covers Goddard’s powder rocket and Oberth’s liquid rocket, steering, landing, travel schedules to Venus and Mars, propellants, atomic and electric rockets, and recent American sounding-rocket ascents. Closing chapters weigh rocket against aircraft, an hour’s flight to the antipodes, a space observatory, cosmic radiation, and a “Résumé of a rocket engineer.” Plates show rockets on the stand and aircraft and spaceship cutaways.