Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online.

A spacecraft is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight. Spacecrafts are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration and space tourism. Spacecrafts used for human spaceflight carry people on board as crew or passengers, while those used for robotic space missions operate either autonomously or telerobotically. Robotic spacecrafts used to support scientific research are space probes. This book studies spacecrafts including launch pads, sounding rockets, reaction engines, and field emission electric propulsions.


Project Webster represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Project Webster continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge.