- Year
- 1958
- By
- Sternfeld, Ari (Part I); various Soviet specialists (Part II)
- Published
- New York: The Citadel Press.
- Edition
- English. First edition, first printing, HC, DJ.
- Ciancone
- N/A.
- Shelf
- L11
- Catalog
- Catalog D · Prelude to Sputnik
Anthology assembled within weeks of Sputnik. Part I is Ari Sternfeld’s own book-length essay “From Earth Satellites to Interplanetary Travel,” its preface dated Moscow, November 1957, a month after Sputnik I and days after Sputnik II.
Part II, “The Sputniks,” gathers translated Pravda and Izvestia reports on all three Sputnik launches alongside contributed pieces by leading Soviet specialists — astronomer V. Ambartsumyan, geophysicist Alexander Obukhov, and Academician A. I. Berg on Sputnik radio tracking among them — closing with a comparison of Soviet and American satellite designs, again by Sternfeld.
Sternfeld, Polish-born, coined the term “cosmonautics” in a French-language book that won the Prix REP-Hirsch of the French Astronomical Society in 1934, then moved to Moscow in 1935; here he appears as one of the first Soviet voices to reach English-language readers after the launches he had spent decades anticipating.