Space Flight

Space Flight (1959) – Lester del Rey
Golden Press • ISBN: charmingly absent
Condition: Good
Launched into orbit by: Crappy Old Books

Before the internet, before reusable rockets, before your phone was more powerful than a room full of whirring cabinets, there was Space Flight (1959) by Lester del Rey, explaining the future of rocketry and space travel in a tone of absolute, straight-faced optimism. This is the space age as imagined in the late 1950s: glorious, tidy, and only mildly radioactive.

Inside this gloriously retro volume, you are invited to a tour of tomorrow as it was confidently scheduled for sometime around 1975. Expect talk of rockets, satellites, space stations, Moon bases, and maybe a speculative nod to Mars—because of course by the year 2000 we’d all be commuting in personal spaceships and holidaying in orbit, perhaps pausing for a sensible lunch.

Lester del Rey, a man who knew his way around both science and science fiction, takes you carefully by the hand and explains how we will:

• Build rockets that look like perfect silver pencils instead of flying fuel tanks.

• Conquer gravity using mathematics, bravery, and possibly a little bit of ignorance of health and safety.

• Live in space stations that resemble gleaming spinning wheels, where everyone wears matching jumpsuits and not one person is holding a latte.

• Travel to the Moon like it’s a moderately complicated camping trip, not a terrifying exercise in hurtling a tin can through lethal vacuum.

If you enjoy that special flavour of pre-Apollo optimism, this book is basically a time capsule: written when the space race was still a very polite sprint with lots of diagrams and not many exploded prototypes (on paper, at least). The Cold War tension is politely offstage; what you get here is wide-eyed technological enthusiasm and diagrams that strongly suggest “it’s fine, we’ve done the maths.”

Now, about this actual copy, as supplied by the ever-honest merchants at Crappy Old Books:

• Condition: Good – which, in our brutally realistic grading system, means this book is entirely present, structurally sound, and ready for further service. It’s not mint, pristine, or museum-grade; it’s more “veteran of several childhood bedrooms and at least one attic.”

• The covers show the kind of light wear you’d expect from a volume that has possibly survived being read by an overexcited ten-year-old who was definitely going to be an astronaut and is now, in reality, middle management.

• The pages have that lovely aged tone somewhere between “cream” and “nicotine memory,” giving everything a pleasantly archival vibe. They remain fully legible unless you insist on reading them under a single 25-watt bulb, in which case that’s on you.

• You may find:

  • Slightly blunted corners.

  • A previous owner’s name written in the front in careful, earnest handwriting.

  • The faintest smell of “old bookshop” which, as everyone knows, is the official fragrance of people who know too much about rockets and not enough about fashion.

What you will not find:

• An ISBN. This is 1959. The idea that every book needed a globally standardised number was still orbiting somewhere in the future.

• Glossy “inspirational” marketing copy. The book assumes you are bright, curious, and not in need of corporate-style pep talks.

• Any awareness of the internet, memes, or the fact that in the future people would argue about space on social media instead of just building rockets and hoping for the best.

Reading Space Flight (1959) today is a wonderfully mixed experience:

• Part history lesson – “Oh, that’s how they thought we’d do it.”

• Part alternate timeline – “Wait, we were supposed to have that by now?”

• Part cosy nostalgia – “Look at this diagram. It’s wrong, but it’s adorably wrong.”

Del Rey’s explanations of thrust, orbits, and the practical realities of leaving the planet are pitched to the intelligent lay reader (or hopeful young space nerd), and the confidence is infectious. You can almost hear the background hum of slide rules and the distant clatter of typewriters as engineers and writers agree that the future is very nearly here, and it will probably involve quite a lot of aluminium.

This book is ideal if you are:

• The sort of person who knows the difference between escape velocity and “I’d just rather stay home.”

• A connoisseur of mid-century science writing, preferably read while sipping tea and muttering “oh, bless” at the more optimistic predictions.

• A collector of retro space ephemera who believes diagrams of multi-stage rockets should be considered a form of interior decoration.

• Someone who just enjoys holding a physical, slightly worn artefact from a time when “space flight” was still more dream than routine launch livestream.

In short, this Good condition copy of Space Flight is not just a book; it’s a souvenir from the moment humanity stood at the edge of the atmosphere, squinted upwards, and said, “Yes, let’s go up there. How hard can it be?”

A slightly scuffed, entirely readable, beautifully out-of-date guide to the future-that-was-coming-any-day-now—delivered, with appropriate irony and affection, by Crappy Old Books.

Keep browsing: See more Space books Other books by Lester Del Rey