Although it is generally believed that the space age began on October 4, 1957, with the launch of the first artificial satellite, the famous Sputnik-1 of the USSR, it is also possible to use June 20, 1944 as the date of departure. On that day, for the first time, an object designed by humans easily crossed the 100-kilometer altitude, today considered the border with space. The machine in question is a German V2, developed by engineer Wernher von Braun, SS and member of the Nazi party, which did not prevent him, later, from becoming the father of the American Saturn-V mega-rocket, that of the Apollo Program. But let us not get ahead of ourselves and keep in mind that The world and space rockets were born in the same year, in 1944. The former will not stop following and commenting on the development of the latter.
The first number of World It is dated December 19, 1944. Just a few days later, in the December 28 edition, the word “rocket” appears, in a section reporting the concerns of U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius: “One only has to consider the advances in aviation over the last thirty years to imagine what an attack with flying bombs or rockets would be like in a future war.”
At the time of its creation, the paper may have had a small editorial staff and was printed on only one page due to paper rationing, but science immediately crept into its columns. The world On December 23, 1944, the first scientific chronicle appeared, signed by Claude-Georges Bossière. Of course, no editor currently in office has worked with him and we must rely on the memoirs of another internal journalist to get an idea of the man who single-handedly ran the Science section. a man of World (Calmann-Lévy, 1989), Jean Planchais outlined the “elegant character” What was Bossière, who? “He described in a few words the upheavals caused by the war or brought about by it. He never lost his composure which made him regard all this as something natural and of purely intellectual interest. President Truman had just announced that an atomic bomb had been detonated in Hiroshima. An atomic bomb? The Bossière affair.
Claude-Georges Bossière glides happily from a nylon column to the mechanism of a nuclear explosion, or from the new Renault 4 CV to the action-reaction principle that drives rockets. The world of January 12, 1945, explains that, in a launcher, “The jet of gas expelled backwards maintains the movement, and this until the reserve of gunpowder is exhausted. In short, a rocket by itself constitutes an engine, a jet engine, which is not loaded with pistons, or connecting rods, or gears, an engine whose respiration directly creates the movement. Starting from this idea we can imagine many things, and the genius of war already has various applications.
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