Journal of the British Interplanetary Society
British Interplanetary Society, London
History
The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) is the journal of the British Interplanetary Society, the spaceflight body founded in London in 1933. The journal began in 1934 and continues today. Its first issue was a six-page pamphlet, and it is recognised as the oldest surviving astronautical publication. It carries technical and scholarly papers on astronautics, among them spacecraft and mission design, propulsion, interstellar flight, exobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The journal is peer-reviewed and has been issued monthly for much of its run. Its papers range from near-term space technology to long-range studies of interstellar flight and the habitability of other worlds. Among astronautics journals it is known for admitting measured speculation on questions at the edge of the field, including exobiology and contact with other civilisations, while holding to technical review.
JBIS belongs to the documentary record as the founding journal of organised spaceflight advocacy and as a primary source for the scientific framing of life beyond Earth. For an archive concerned with non-human intelligence, it documents the engineering and exobiological thread that runs alongside, and often apart from, the popular saucer record. Cite the specific volume, number and year for any paper.
For the author of the journal's 1946 spaceflight paper, see the biography of Arthur C. Clarke. The journal documents the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the engineering thread of space exploration in the archive.
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