Patrick Maurel was a French author and illustrator specialising in popular spaceflight writing. He conceived, wrote and illustrated L'escalade du cosmos (Bordas, 1972), a sweeping illustrated history of astronautics published at the height of the Apollo era. The book displays a firm technical command of rocketry and propulsion and an unusually balanced treatment of the American and Soviet space programmes, rare in the literature of its time. Beyond this work, biographical details about him (life dates, career) remain poorly documented.