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Herman Potočnik | |
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| Born | (1892-12-22)22 December 1892 |
| Died | 27 August 1929(1929-08-27) (aged 36) |
Herman Potočnik (pseudonymHermann Noordung;Pola, 22 December 1892 –Vienna, 27 August 1929) was anAustro-Hungarian Army officer, electrical engineer andastronautics theorist ofSlovenian origin. He is regarded as an early theorist of modernspace flight and is remembered mainly for his work concerning the long-term human habitation of space.
Potočnik was born in Pola (nowPula),Istria, then part of theAustria-Hungarian monarchy (now inCroatia). His family was ofSlovene ethnicity and originated fromLower Styria (nowSlovenia).
Both of Potočnik's parents were Slovenian. His father Jožef was born in 1841 inZgornji Razbor and at the time of Herman's birth he served as a doctor and a navy officer of theAustro-Hungarian Navy harbour of Pola. His mother Minka was born February 7, 1854; she was a descendant ofCzech immigrants, manufacturers of crucibles for glass-making, and a daughter of a well known wine merchant and local councillor Jožef Kokošinek fromMaribor (born inVitanje). In 1866, Herman's father Jožef participated with thesecond Battle of Vis, where the Austrian Navy commanded byWilhelm von Tegetthoff defeated theRoyal Italian Navy. Jožef was later ageneral in theAustro-Hungarian Army.
When Herman's father died in 1894, his mother relocated the family toMaribor. Herman had two brothers, Adolf and Gustav (who were both navy officers), and a sister Frančiška (Franci). He spent most of his childhood years in Maribor and, according to oral sources, in Vitanje.
The meaning of hisGerman-like pseudonym Noordung is still a mystery, but some suggest that he used it to indicate the problems ofchaos (German:Ordnung, "order";ordunga inSlovene colloquial language). Assuming that the initial "N" was intended as a negation, the name could mean "no order".
In Maribor, Potočnik attended primary school. Afterward he attended the military secondary schools inFischau andHranice inMoravia. His uncle Heinrich was a major-general in the army, and probably enabled his study at Austrian military schools. From 1910 to 1913 he studied at theImperial and Royal Technical Military Academy inMödling in Lower Austria (Niederösterreich) nearVienna and graduated as an engineer second lieutenant. His specialization was building of railways and bridges.
DuringWorld War I he served inGalicia,Serbia andBosnia and in 1915 he was promoted to the rank ofFirst Lieutenant (Oberleutnant). He was assigned to the southwestern front of theSoča battlefield and there he experienced a breakthrough of the Austrian army to the river Piava and its retreat. In 1919 he was pensioned from the Austrian military with the rank of captain because oftuberculosis that he contracted during the war. He started to studyelectrical engineering in themechanical engineering department of theUniversity of Technology in Vienna, Austria, and was awarded a doctorate in engineering. From 1925 onward, he devoted himself entirely to the problems of rocket science andspace technology. Owing to chronic illness, he did not find a job or marry, but lived with his brother Adolf in Vienna, Austria.
At the end of 1928, he published his sole book,Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums – der Raketen-Motor (The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor) inBerlin. The publisher, Richard Carl Schmidt, printed the year 1929 as a publishing date, probably from a purely business motive (to keep the book looking new throughout the coming year) and this date is often mistakenly given as the actual date of publication. In 188 pages and 100 handmade illustrations, Potočnik described a plan for establishment of a permanent human presence in outer space. He conceived a detailed design for aspace station, regarded by Russian and American historians of spaceflight to be the firstspace architecture.[citation needed] He described the use of orbiting spacecraft for detailed observation of the ground for peaceful and military purposes, and described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments.[1] Potočnik expressed strong doubts of the potentially destructive military use of these fresh discoveries.
The book was translated intoRussian during early 1935, Slovene in 1986 (by theSlovenska matica), English in 1995 (byNASA) and Croatian in 2004 (byMarino Fonović, published by Labin Art Press). A partial translation to English, containing most of the essential chapters, was made as early as 1929 for the American magazineScience Wonder Stories and was issued in three parts (July, August and September 1929) and credited to "Captain Hermann Noordung, A.D., M.E., Berlin."[2][3][4] The article was also published in Science Wonder Stories' affiliated publicationAir Wonder Stories at the same time.[5]
With his many ideas he became one of the founders of astronautics. His concepts were first considered seriously only by amateur rocketeers in Germany, theVerein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR – "Spaceflight Society"), the most notable of whom wasHermann Oberth. In its Russian edition, the book may also have influencedSergey Korolev and his acquaintances.[citation needed] More locally, Viennese engineers dismissed his work as fantasy.[citation needed]
Potočnik's book described geostationary satellites (first proposed byKonstantin Tsiolkovsky) and discussed communication between them and the ground using radio, but did not suggest the idea of using satellites for mass broadcasting and as telecommunications relays (developed byArthur C. Clarke in his articleWireless World of 1945). The wheel-shaped space station served as an inspiration for further development byWernher von Braun (another former VfR member) in 1952. Von Braun considered orbiting space stations as intermediate to travel to other planets. In 1955 and 1968,George Pal's andByron Haskin'sConquest of Space (based on Wernher von Braun's published concepts: first, several articles inCollier's magazine 1952–1954, co-written withWilly Ley andChesley Bonestell, and later developed into books fromViking Press.[6]) andStanley Kubrick's movie2001: A Space Odyssey, respectively, depicted such a role for "Space Station V".
In recent research, Potočnik’s rotating wheel station ('Wohnrad') has been re-evaluated through digital reconstruction and architectural analysis, revealing details of the internal spatial organization, proportional relationships of habitat modules, and functional layout that were not fully described in earlier secondary sources. This research situates his design as a precursor to later rotating space habitat concepts and deepens our understanding of his intentions for human habitation in orbit.[7]
Potočnik died ofpneumonia at the age of 36 while in great poverty in Vienna,Austria, and was buried there. An obituary notice about his death was printed in one Maribor daily newspaper, mentioning his ranks (engineers and captain), his illness, but nothing about his work regarding space.
