While the VfR pursued rocketry in Germany, parallel and largely independent movements were taking shape in the United States and the Soviet Union. In Kaluga, the self-taught schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had been publishing on rocket propulsion, multi-stage boosters, and space travel since the 1890s; several of his works, including Space Rocket Trains (1929) and a 1937 biography of his life and ideas by Iakov Perelman, are in this collection.

In the United States, Robert Goddard conducted his own experiments largely outside the public eye. His 1936 Smithsonian report, Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development — also cataloged in this collection — gave the first public account of his historic 1926 liquid-fuel launch, illustrated with photographs of his test towers at Roswell, New Mexico, and of the gyroscope stabilizer used to control the rocket in flight.

David Lasser, first president of the American Interplanetary Society, made a parallel case to a popular readership in The Conquest of Space (1931), the first English-language book devoted to space travel. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, the aviator Nikolai Kamanin — later the man who selected Yuri Gagarin as the first human in space — published his own memoir, My Biography Is Only Beginning (1935), recounting his celebrated 1934 rescue of the stranded Chelyuskin expedition in the Arctic.

Popular enthusiasm for rocketry also found its way into everyday ephemera: the 1936 First International Rocket Air Mail Flight between the United States and Mexico, cataloged elsewhere in this collection, carried covers bearing a distinctive tri-color stamp design.