Astronautics

Common card · No. 365244

Astronautics (or cosmonautics) is the practice of sending spacecraft beyond Earth's atmosphere into outer space. Spaceflight is one of its main applications and space science is its overarching field. The term astronautics (originally astronautique in French) was coined in the 1920s by J.-H. Rosny, president of the Goncourt academy, in analogy with aeronautics. Because there is a degree of technical overlap between the two fields, the term aerospace is often used to describe both at once. In 1930, Robert Esnault-Pelterie published the first book on the new research field. The term cosmonautics (originally cosmonautique in French) was introduced in the 1930s by Ary Sternfeld with his book Initiation à la Cosmonautique (Introduction to cosmonautics) (the book brought him the Prix REP-Hirsch, later known as the Prix d'Astronautique, of the French Astronomical Society in 1934.) As with aeronautics, the restrictions of mass, temperatures, and external forces require that applications in space...

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