La navigation interplanétaire
Communication faite à la Société astronomique de France les 1er et 8 avril 1935
In April 1935 Alexandre Ananoff, then twenty-five, delivered to the Société Astronomique de France a two-part communication mapping the state of interplanetary navigation on the eve of the space age. France's emerging popularizer of astronautics ran through the literary precursors (Cyrano, Wells, Verne), dismissed unworkable schemes (cannon, sling, tunnel), then laid out the contemporary scientific work of Goddard, Oberth, Hohmann, Hoefft, Tsiolkovski and Noordung. Trajectories, weightlessness, orbital relay stations, atomic propulsion: the thirty-two-page pamphlet, prefaced by André Hirsch, methodically charts the agenda of a still-emerging discipline, with an international bibliography of more than fifty entries.