Introduction

There are plenty of excellent books and articles in which the effects caused by rocket burns and launches have been described. Thus, the result of investigation of such phenomena has been summarized in numerous special textbooks and articles (see, e.g., Refs. [1-11] and the references therein). In the existing works, the effects observed along the active zone of the rocket trajectory have been discussed briefly. Unfortunately, very little work exists that is related to studies of plasma and geomagnetic field perturbations at ranges of 1,000-10,000 from the rocket trajectory. The authors of this book call the corresponding perturbations “large-scale” or “global” disturbances. As shown in the book, the lifetime of such perturbations is 80-90 min, covering ranges from 5,000 to 20,000 km of the rocket trajectory; that is, such disturbances are global both in time and space domains.