L'exploration par fusées de la très haute atmosphère et la possibilité des voyages interplanétaires

Lecture delivered by Robert Esnault-Pelterie before the Société Astronomique de France on 8 June 1927 and published in March 1928 as a supplement to the SAF Bulletin, with a preface by General Ferrié. An expanded restatement of his 1912 communication to the Société Française de Physique, it lays out the scientific problem of the rocket motor and of interplanetary travel: equations of motion in vacuum and in air, physiological conditions for the habitability of a sealed vehicle, transit times to the Moon, Venus, and Mars under various propulsive assumptions. It introduces the term "astronautique," coined by J.-H. Rosny Aîné, and establishes in the same session the REP-Hirsch Prize and the SAF's Astronautics Commission. Mathematical, physiological, and philosophical in turn (it includes a meticulous critique of Arrhenius's panspermia theory) the text prefigures the great 1930 treatise L'Astronautique.