New British Airmail Rocket Successfully Passes Initial Test

\ANOTHER step toward the establishment of rocket airmail was reached in England recently when a rocket perfected by Gerhard Zucker, German inventor, successfully completed a short test flight.

Carrying a load of 1200 letters, the rocket was fired from Brighton and made a two-mile trip without damaging its cargo. The letters were then removed and posted in the ordinary manner. Encouraged by results of the test flight, a British rocket syndicate is planning a series of extensive experiments.

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Rocket’s Flight Kept In Sight

Gun-mounted camera eye keeps movie record of V-2 missile as it speeds into space at 3,500 miles an hour.

By Martin Mann

POPEYE is a seeing machine. Popeye can see things yon can’t see. His big glass eye can follow a V-2 zooming 3,500 m.p.h, and tell you just what it does at the 100-mile peak of its flight. But even Popeye is no match for enemy guided missiles—he could not spot an attacking rocket soon enough to sound the alarm.

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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.

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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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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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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Amazing Turbine-Rocket to Explore Outer Space

By Lew Holt

Prof. R. H. Goddard, famous rocket experimenter, has just patented a remarkable turbine-rocket which makes the age-old dream of traveling in space mechanically possible. Details of this astonishing invention and of other experiments which pave the way for regular lines of ships traveling through the earth’s stratosphere at 1000 miles an hour are presented in this absorbing article.

DOWN in a secluded section of New Mexico a scientist who has for years been experimenting with rockets has succeeded in devising a mechanism combining the principles of the rocket and the turbine, giving the world an entirely new vehicle of transportation capable of traveling hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface— and perhaps, some day, of making a trip to the moon or nearby planets.

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Roto-Chute for Rocket Pilots

SUICIDE is the word for the pilot who tries to escape from a supersonic plane by parachute. The billowing fabric ‘chute was -a wonderful aerial lifesaver —till Air Force pilots started streaking faster than sound in rocket planes like the Bell XS-1. The impact of the air at such speeds is so terrific that it will not only shred the parachute like a burst of shrapnel but also peel the flesh off the pilot’s bones.

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How You’ll Fly to the MOON

THE days of dreaming about a trip to the moon are over. The research destined to make that trip an actuality is already well under way.

Next May the first step on the long, long trail into space may be made: Man hopes to send something up that will never come down again (see “Going Up for Keeps,” p. 66). In the words of Dr. Fritz Zwicky, the California Institute of Technology physicist who suggested the May satellite-making experiment, “We first throw a little something into the skies. Then a little more, then a shipload of instruments—then ourselves.”

And other scientists agree. Dr. James A. Van Allen, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, anticipates sending a rocket to the moon (one way, no crew) within 15 years. “A conservative estimate,” he says. Maj. P. C. Calhoun, chief of the AAF’s guided-missile branch, expects to travel to the moon and back in his lifetime. And the University of California at Los Angeles already offers a course in rocket navigation!

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Rockets Lay Phone Lines

SIGNAL Corps linemen are adding rockets to their tool kits. The fiery missiles pull telephone wire from a new type of dispenser across streams, ravines, and other obstacles. One man, equipped with the dispenser, a few rockets, and a field telephone, can now set up communications in rough terrain faster than a large crew using conventional methods.

The new wire dispenser was developed from a model used during the war. With it. the wire-laying rocket may be fired without a launcher. The rocket is set off in the original cardboard packing case, which is placed in a wedge-shaped hole dug in the ground. Even when fired in this manner, the rocket will carry wire as much as 150 yards.

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Rocket Brakes for Emergency Stops?

POWERFUL JETS CAN STOP CAR IN HALF NORMAL BRAKING DISTANCE

By Capt. G. C. MacDonald

ROCKET propellants, cased in special jet housings under the hood, may be used on future passenger cars and trucks as spectacularly efficient emergency brakes.

What is believed to be the first vehicle using jet emergency brakes has already been tested at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory, Cumberland, Md., with the writer serving as test driver. An ordinary jeep, provided with a safety belt and a steel pyramid for protection in case of upset, was fitted with two jet thrust units mounted beside the hood at an angle of 45 deg. Segments of the wheels were painted white to permit high-speed camera analysis of wheel behavior during stopping.

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ALL ABOARD FOR OUTER SPACE!

Is this the ship that will take us to earth’s first manned satellite?

By G. Harry Stine, Viking-Aerobee Operations Engineer, White Sands Proving Grounds

ON May 24, 1954, a Navy Viking rocket thundered 158 miles into space.

As recently as February 1949, a V-2/ WAC-Corporal “Bumper” rocket soared 250 miles into the sky over New Mexico’s White Sands Proving Grounds.

Just last year, an Air Force pilot flew the Bell X-1A rocket plane “above 80,000 feet” and at more than twice the speed of sound.

We have built rockets which have gone beyond the earth’s atmosphere and returned; they have reached altitudes where the remnants of the atmosphere around them were a better vacuum than that in a radio tube. We have sent men to altitudes where their blood would boil if they were not protected by a pressure suit and a pressurized cabin.

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