Rocket pioneer Robert Goddard was killed today in an large explosion. Apparently the explosion occurred when a prototype Mark I Strato-Rocket was dropped on the floor. His last words reportedly were “I got it, got it, whoops!”

Strato-Rocket Nears Completion

A ROCKET flight 150 miles into the stratosphere at a speed of more than 700 miles an hour was predicted for sometime next year following a visit of Col. Charles A. Lindbergh and Harry F. Guggenheim at the rocket laboratory of Dr. Robert H. Goddard near Roswell, New Mexico.

In a joint statement, Dr. Goddard and Mr. Guggenheim reported great advancement in their discoveries, and announced that next year’s flight would be for the purpose of gathering information on electrical phenomena such as the reflection of radio waves in the upper stratosphere.

Present plans call for a parachute attachment to the rocket so that scientific instruments may be safely lowered.

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Fate of UNIVERSE May Be Told in Cosmic Ray Origin

by JAY EARLE MILLER

Where in the universe does the mysterious cosmic ray originate? Science is now conducting extensive research to solve that mystery, for the answer may disclose the destiny of the earth we live on.

ON MOUNTAIN tops in Hawaii, Alaska, Peru and at other isolated points around the world—eighteen stations in all—an answer is being sought this summer to the most perplexing question in modern science —what is a cosmic ray?

First discovered nearly thirty years ago, and made famous in 1925 when Dr. Millikan of California Tech confirmed their existence, and, much to his embarrassment, the press named them “Millikan’s rays,” the cosmic emanation continues to be the baffling enigma on which scientists throughout the world are divided.

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I screwed up when scanning this article and I’m missing the last few pages. So I’m sorry but you’ll have to make due with the first 15.

As Jayessell pointed out in the comments to another article from this magazine, the cover image as well as the first page of this article are from the 1929 Fritz Lang picture “Frau im Mond”. I’m not sure if the landscapes and moonscapes are from the same movie, but they are beautifully done.

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ROCKET TO THE MOON?

The favorite theme of science fiction is no longer a fantasy-latest advances in rocket research make it a distinct possibility.

BY WILLY LEY

Charter Member of British Interplanetary Society and Author of Rockets—Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere

THE STORY OF THE MOON GUN

WITH the exception of an occasional comet, our moon is the nearest of all celestial bodies. Its average distance, in round figures, is 240,000 miles. Sometimes it is distant by 13,000 miles more, sometimes, when the moon is closer in its orbital gyrations, it is almost 20,000 miles less. The average, or mean, of all the possible distances is 240,000 miles; or, if you want to be more precise, 238,900 miles.

As astronomical distances go, this is very close indeed; it is not even very far when a purely terrestrial yardstick is applied. I know a Hollywood producer who, for business reasons, has to come to New York five times every year. After eight years of flying to New York five times a year and back, he will have travelled the whole distance to the moon. Taken as one trip, it would be 900 hours on a fast transport, 600 hours on a modern fighter plane.

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Forecast: A SKY FULL OF SATELLITES

By Richard F. Dempewolff

MAN’S GREAT DREAM of stepping off his island in the universe to explore the spangled reaches of space took a giant step toward realization on October 4, 1957. That date marks the exclamation point in history when a 184-pound moon, boosted by a mighty rocket smashing skyward from an airfield on the Caspian Sea, was programmed into an 18,000-mile-per-hour orbit around the earth.

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The Challenge of Space
The dream of human flight is as old as man—and the ultimate goal is the stars.

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Tom Thumb Planetarium Easily Built from Odds and Ends

By GAYLORD JOHNSON

SIMPLE PROJECTOR MAKES THE CONSTELLATIONS MARCH ACROSS A SCREEN IN YOUR LIVING ROOM

IF YOU ever attended a performance in a large public planetarium, you probably envied the lecturer’s ability to rehearse any part of the drama of the skies at will. Or perhaps you never have witnessed the march of the stars across a giant dome, and are anxious to see a man-made sky in action. At a cost of less than a dollar, you can assemble, from odds and ends, a midget planetarium that will put on a performance right in your own parlor.

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Observatory Built of Junk

Great Earthquake Registered on Homemade Instrument—Horsehairs Make Hygrometer

WHEN slippage along an old fault sent violent earth tremors through southern California recently, it wrote a detailed story upon homemade instruments in an amateur scientist’s laboratory near the center of the disturbance. Upon the black drum of a home-constructed seismograph, it swung a needle, giving its builder, Martin G. Murray, a record of the disaster. Ever since last December, Murray had noticed an increase in the number of tremors. Fom December 16 to 26, his instrument registered fourteen shocks. In March came the quake that left hundreds of buildings in ruins.

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Berlin to New York in less than One Hour!

By HUGO GERNSBACK

IT is a curious failing of human natrue that it is inclined to pooh-pooh new and scientific ideas, particularly if they deal with high speeds. If you had told that master of extravagant imagination, Jules Verne, at the time he wrote his story “Around the World in Eighty Days,” that in 1931 flyers would circle the earth in nine days, he probably would have taken it as a good joke. Nevertheless, facts speak for themselves; and the circumnavigation of the globe has actually been accomplished in nine days. That it will soon be circled in twenty-four hours, no one now doubts.

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ORBITING NEEDLES To Aid Communication

A MAN-MADE ionosphere—composed of millions of tiny metal needles—soon may replace the ionized layer of atmosphere presently used in radio communication. The artificial ionosphere, actually two narrow bands of needles, 3,000 to 6,000 miles from Earth, will make possible for the first time reliable, high-quality and low-cost, television, voice radio and teletype communication between any two points on Earth.

Unlike the natural ionosphere, the bands will stay at the same distance from Earth, have a constant density and the same radio-reflecting qualities undisturbed by storms and sunspots. The system has been developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Air Force Air Research and Development Command.

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The Man Who Opened the Door to Space

NO MAN made a greater personal contribution to this fearsome and challenging era of missiles than the late Robert H. Goddard, an ailing, publicity-shy physics professor from Worcester, Mass., who sought only peaceful scientific uses for his epochal inventions.

This month, 14 years after his death at 62, the entire U. S. missile industry will honor him at a conference.

“He was just as surely the father of modern rockets as the Wright brothers were of the airplane,” Henry F. Guggenheim, noted patron of aeronautical research, has declared.

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This shows you how fast technology can change. Only 36 years after this article declared that a trip to the moon was “apparently impossible”, Neil Armstrong actually walked on it.

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GETTING More LIGHT On the Moon

By Calvin Frazer

IT IS unwise to dogmatize about the future, and hence a cautious man of science “would hardly make the positive assertion that human beings will never visit the moon, though the difficulties involved in such a journey now appear insuperable. On the other hand it is quite safe to assert that, without leaving his own planet, man will learn much more about the earth’s satellite in days to come than he knows today. This expectation is based upon the remarkable progress accomplished in the study of the moon in recent years.

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Yes, all you need to recreate the universe is a hand-drill, a thumb tack and some oil. Amazing!

Simple Experiment Shows How the Universe Was Formed

By Gaylord Johnson

A TINY globule of machine oil, spinning around in a beaker of wood alcohol, will reenact for you one of the most stupendous dramas of the universe—the formation of a giant spiral nebula.

Photographs of these far-off galaxies of stars made through giant telescopes show that, in spite of minor physical differences, they all have one feature in common: the main structure consists of two curving arms spiraling out from opposite sides of a central mass.

Obviously, this structure is the result of a whirling, centrifugal force. But why should there always be just two arms? That is what this simple demonstration will show you.

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