A very great amount of scientific effort has been expended in the last few years on Rocket research and development. This work has been carried out in many countries besides Great Britain, notably the U.S.A., Germany and Russia. In the main it has been done by government scientists or by firms and universities under government contract. This is understandable since the chief use of rockets so far has been a military one. There is a very long history of the use of rockets in warfare (they were used at Waterloo), culminating in the production and firing of the German V2. Most of the major rocket weapons produced in the last war have been described in general terms in the Press, but there is, at present, remarkably little mathematical or scientific literature on the subject. Various technical journals,e.g. Flight, have published articles on the various aspects of the rocket problem, and there are one or two books. This lack is due to the fact that most of the papers written during the war years are classified as Secret or Confidential and are not yet available for open publication. Two recent papers are worthy of mention : one by Perring (1) on German Long Range Rocket Development, which gives a considerable amount of data on the V2 and one by Malina and Summerfield (2) on Rocket Escape from the Earth which discusses the possibilities of very large rockets. These may be regarded as the forerunners of very many papers which should eventually find their way into scientific literature.