L'Aventure astronautique

An adaptation of the French translation for Hachette's Bibliothèque Verte youth collection. Gartmann's biographical panorama of the pioneers of astronautics is condensed into seven chapters aimed at a young readership. From Ganswindt to von Braun (via Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth) the narrative foregrounds the boldness and perseverance of the early inventors, at the expense of the technical rigour found in the full translation. A closing chapter on Sputnik 1, added posthumously (Gartmann died in 1960), anchors the book in the immediate reality of the dawning space age. Illustrated by J.-P. Ariel, this volume is a valuable document of how popular science writing on space for young readers developed in France at the very beginning of the space era.