News-Letter Number One, July 1956.

The Society’s first news-letter, launched to replace the quarterly Journal with a bimonthly circular while the Journal itself continued in enlarged, twice-yearly form under editor Prof. C. B. Jeppe.

Most of the officers named here — Bleksley, van den Ham, Jeppe, Howell, and Venter — would reappear on the editorial board of Conquest when that members-only circular relaunched as a public newsstand magazine fourteen months later, in September 1957 (also in this collection).

Reports two recent lectures (on electronics and the cyclotron), a visit to the S.A.A.F. base at Zwartkops, a group trip to the Pretoria cyclotron laboratory, and an effort to sort the 99-strong membership into district groups, including a nascent Port Elizabeth branch already experimenting with rocket design.

Notes the Society’s affiliation with the International Astronautical Federation, whose seventh congress was to meet in Rome that September, and closes with a skeptical aside on a Sunday Times report of an American rocket reaching 613 miles — “scrambled figures,” the editors suspect, unless it refers to the MOUSE satellite project — alongside a mention of members’ curiosity about “Flying Saucers.”