Astronautics was born on paper, half a century before Sputnik. From Tsiolkovsky, who set out the laws of reaction flight as early as 1903, to Goddard, Oberth and Esnault-Pelterie, a handful of scattered theorists (often isolated, sometimes mocked) laid the mathematical and technical foundations of space travel. Around them arose the first astronautical societies, in Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France, turning solitary speculation into a collective discipline.
This founding literature runs from the learned treatise to militant popularisation: mathematical demonstrations, lectures, society bulletins, the first panoramas written for the general public. Alongside the great names, more unexpected figures of self-taught visionaries long ignored by history.
It is a corpus finite by nature: that of the years when astronautics existed only on paper. Its fascination lies in its precocity: the essentials of spaceflight were thought through before any rocket worthy of the name had left the ground.