It has been remarked that in half a century the bomber aircraft has risen from insignificance to be a prime weapon of war and is sinking again into obsolescence without any general rules having ever been agreed setting limits to its use. What the First World War did for the aircraft the Second World War did for the rocket. Will it too be replaced by even more fearsome engines and reach its decline, escaping any general control?

In little over 20 years, the rocket has passed from being the smiled-on object of amateur experiment and failure to become a vehicle of enormous speed and range, with expenditure and engineering effort the only limits to its potentialities. The steps are worth recalling quickly. The first serious use of rockets was as short range missiles by the Red Army in the Second World War. There followed the successive breakthroughs of the V.2, the first satellites in orbit in 1957, impact on the Moon in 1959, men in orbit in 1961, a successful Venus probe in 1962,a manoeuvrable spacecraft in 1963 and, in February 1964, the launching of Saturn by the United States far surpassing any previous launching achievement either American or Russian.