L'aventure cosmique

A wide-ranging popular synthesis by Hilaire Cuny, situating astronautics within the framework of astronomy and the sciences of the cosmos. After a history of the dream of spaceflight (from antiquity to Tsiolkovsky) and a chronology of the conquest of space (from Sputnik to the Salyut program), the book surveys contemporary astrophysics and cosmology: relativity, the life and death of stars, galaxies, quasars and pulsars, cosmogonic models (the primeval atom, the recession of galaxies), then the question of life in the Universe. The final chapter explores future "promises": utilitarian astronautics, nuclear propulsion, relativistic interstellar travel, communication with possible civilisations (Project Ozma) and hibernation. An original work written at Orsay in 1970.