L'humanité devant la navigation interplanétaire

Published in 1947 in Calmann-Lévy's new "Science et Humanité" series edited by Roger Simonet, this debut by Albert Ducrocq (then Technical Advisor to the French Astronautics Section, later one of France's foremost science popularizers) sets out, across eleven chapters and a closing appendix, the technical conditions and civilisational stakes of interplanetary travel at the dawn of the atomic age. Ducrocq examines the liquid-fuel interplanetary rocket, sketches a 3,000-ton nuclear astronef driven by direct ejection of fission products, surveys in turn the Moon, Mars, Venus, Deimos and Phobos and "the realm of the other worlds", then develops his most original argument (the "logistic law of humanity") which casts space conquest as a demographic and political survival condition for the species. The closing chapters extrapolate to extraterrestrial life and "macroscopic disintegration": asteroid waystations and vehicles, orbital re-engineering, "robot-worlds" steering the solar system. A technical appendix summarises atomic physics in the wake of the Smyth report.