Cofounder, with Les Johnson, and first president of the British
Interplanetary Society (1933) and author of Rockets in Space: The Dawn
of Interplanetary Travel (1936) and Into Space (1954). Cleator proved
to be more prescient than one of his reviewers, the astronomer Richard van der
Riet Wooley, who in the March 14, 1936, issue of Nature wrote:
The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space] ... presents
difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion
as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author’s insistent appeal to put
aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air
flight before it was actually accomplished.
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