The Problem of Space Travel: Herman Potočnik Noordung, 1929
1929 · book
In 1929 a book appeared in Berlin describing, in careful engineering detail, how human beings might live and work permanently in orbit. Its author signed himself Hermann Noordung. His real name was Herman Potočnik, an engineer of Slovene family born in Pula in 1892, a former officer of the Austro Hungarian army who had left the service in poor health and had spent his savings on the study of rocketry.
The book set out a space station in three parts, a habitat wheel spun to create artificial gravity, an observatory and a power plant using a mirror to concentrate sunlight. He worked through the problems of air, heat, weightlessness, communications and the mechanics of moving between the parts. He also described the value of a station placed in an orbit whose period matches the rotation of the Earth, so that it stays above one point on the ground, which is the orbit in which almost every communications satellite now sits.
Potočnik died of pneumonia in Vienna a few months after publication, aged thirty four, in poverty. The book was read by the engineers who mattered. It was excerpted in an American magazine in 1929, studied by the rocket teams of the 1930s and 1950s, and its rotating wheel became the standard image of a space station in illustration and in film, most famously in a film released in 1968 about a journey to Jupiter.
In Slovenia his name has been recovered from near obscurity. A cultural centre devoted to space technologies opened in 2012 in Vitanje, the town his family came from, in a building shaped like his wheel. He never saw a rocket leave the ground, and much of what he described has been built.