Rockets And Guided Missiles.

The Macmillan Company’s New York edition of John Humphries’s survey of rocket propulsion and guided missiles, with contents identical to the British edition of 1956. The jacket contents list runs from the Introduction and History through solid-propellant motors (a chapter contributed by A. R. Shalders), liquid propellants and liquid-propellant motors, testing, missile guidance and aerodynamics, short-range and long-range ballistic missiles, research missiles, aircraft propulsion and miscellaneous rocket applications, to a closing chapter on the future. The jacket back advertises other Macmillan titles, including Eric Burgess’s Frontier to Space, which is also in this catalog.

The final chapter, “The Future—Nuclear Energy—Space-Flight,” treats space flight as the next step beyond high-altitude sounding, with a table of escape velocities for the solar system and a graph of the Earth–Moon “gravitational pit.” The text is illustrated throughout with line figures, graphs and tables.

An Appendix Bibliography of annotated books (Section A), journals (Section B) and reports and periodicals (Section C) notes that over 150 volumes had been published on rockets, and points readers to the library of the British Interplanetary Society. Among the early entries are Koelle and Kaeppeler’s Literature-Index of Astronautics (1954) and Goddard’s Rockets (American Rocket Society, 1946), the latter also in Catalog C.