OK again I have a beautiful book: To Other Planets by Pavel Klushantsev. (My helpful readers chimed in on this one to help me out.)
This may be my favorite Russian book in terms of illustrations. Until I got this copy I only knew of it from the 1962 Hebrew translation I had found a number of years ago (I had even less luck translating that title).
But the illustrations were the same and I knew I had found a winner. This is the gold medal of space books. Tons and tons of full color illustrations showing children how man will go to space and what it will look like. Of course it starts off explaining about rockets and showing their launch.
From here it talks about launching a space station and heading towards the moon. The space station illustration seems an "interpretation " of the Fred Freeman illustration from the 1954-1956 Collier's series but has its own Russian slant.
I am still not sure how space station designers got the idea for have a 3 prong stations. Two or four makes sense for balance but the 3 prong was developed for the Disney programs so they would not impinge on the Collier's design copyright. They seemed to have corrected that flaw in this illustration.
They laid out the idea for a moon trip in an elegant series of drawings that make the whole mission seems very easy. In 1959 it seemed to every child that we were just a few steps from standing on the Moon.
The title of the book is To Other Planets. The author, Pavel Klushantsev, is well known Russian SF film director and screenwriter, author of a well-known movie Planet of Storms, reedited for American distribution as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet.
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