From the powder rocket to the orbital launcher, this theme follows the central technical object of astronautics. The founding treatises (Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, Esnault-Pelterie) laid down the theory; Peenemünde and the V-2 turned speculation into industry; then came the launchers of the great space powers, European access to space and the modern launcher families.
Its literature runs from the learned treatise to the engineer's memoir, from the technical manual to illustrated popularisation and programme history. So many ways of telling the same thing: how a payload is wrested from Earth's gravity.