Philippe de La Cotardière, born on 11 April 1949 in Bourg-en-Bresse, is a French science writer and journalist specializing in astronomy, spaceflight and the history of science. A member of the French Astronomical Society from his teens, he served as its president from 1987 to 1993 and was for many years editorial adviser to Larousse, for whom he edited and wrote numerous popular-science works, including the Dictionnaire de l'astronomie. Co-founder in 1978 of the magazine Espace et Civilisation with Albert Ducrocq, he received in 1997 the French Academy of Sciences' prize for scientific and technical communication. In La conquête de l'espace (Larousse, 1983) he wrote the third part, on astronautics, "beyond the atmosphere".