Herman Potocnik


Herman Poto?nik (pseudonym Hermann Noordung) (December 12, 1892 - August 27,
1929) was a Slovenian pioneer of astronautics and cosmonautics, and rocket engineer.

Potocnik was born in Pola, southern Istria, Austria-Hungary (now Pula,
Croatia). His family originates from Slovenj Gradec and Vitanje, Slovenia,
although Austrians adopt him as their own, but they recognize his Slovenian
origin.

His father Jo?ef was born in 1841 in Razbor near Slovenj Gradec and at the
time of Herman's birth he served as a doctor and high navy officer in the
Austro-Hungarian navy harbour of Pola. His mother Minka was born February 7,
1854. She was a descendant of Czech immigrants, manufacturers of
melting-pots for glass and a daughter of a well known wine merchant and a
councillor Jo?ef Koko?inek from Maribor. Father died in 1894 and his widow
moved with four children to Maribor (at that time also officially named
Marburg). Herman had two brothers Adolf and Gustav (who were both navy
officers), and a sister Franci. In Maribor Poto?nik attended primary school.
Afterward he went to the military secondary schools in Fischau and Hranice
(MŠhrisch-Wei§kirchen) in Moravia. He had an uncle Heinrich, who was a major
general and he probably enabled him schooling at Austrian military schools.
From 1910 to 1913 he studied at the technical military academy in Mšdling in
Lower Austria (Niederšsterreich) near Vienna and graduated as an engineers
second lieutenant. His specialization was building of railways and bridges.

During the 1st World War he served in Galicia, Serbia and Bosnia and in 1915
he was promoted to the rank of a first lieutenant (Oberleutnant). He was
assigned to the southwestern front of the So?a battlefield and there he
experienced a breakthrough of Austrian army to the river Piava and its
retreat. In 1919 he was pensioned off from the Austrian military with the
rank of captain because of tuberculosis, he got during the war. He started
to study electrical engineering in the mechanical engineering department of
the University of Technology in Vienna. Becoming an engineer, specialist in
a rocket technics in 1925 he entirely devoted himself to the problems of a
rocket science and space technology. Owing to hard illness he did not find a
job or married but he stayed with his brother Adolf in Vienna.

In the end of 1928 he published in German his sole book Das Problem der
Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raketen-motor (English The Problem of Space
Travel - The Rocket Motor, Slovenian Problem vo?nje po Vesolju - Raketni
motor) in Berlin. A publisher Richard Carl Schmidt printed the year 1929 as
a publishing date, probably from a pure businesslike motives so this date
remained. In this book Poto?nik spread a plan for a breakthrough into space
and for a residence of mankind in it. He conceived a space station in a
detail and calculated its geostationary orbit. The book has 188 pages and
100 illustrations. It was reprinted and translated into Slovene in 1986 by
the Slovenska matica. In 1984 Vojko Kogej found a German reprint of this
book from 1938 in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, DDR among more than 6
million fascicles.

With his many ideas he became one of the founders of the astronautics. His
ideas were first taken seriously only by Hermann Oberth and his co-workers,
and later by Wernher von Braun and Arthur Charles Clarke. Viennese
technicians misjudged him as an unreal fantast. His book influenced on the
German rocket circle (von Braun) and most probably on the Russian one
(Sergei Pavlovich Korolev). The book had already been translated into
Russian at the beginning of 1935 in Moscow and into English in 1995 by NASA.
In 1999 Kogej found a Russian edition at the Russian State Library in
Moscow. Clarke wrote on January 15, 1993 to Frederick I. Ordway III:

     PROBLEM VOENJE PO VESOLJU

     This afternoon just as I was leaving for the Otters Club to beat up the
     locals at table tennis, I noticed two young European backpackers
     hovering around my gate. Stopped to find who they were, and discovered
     they were a couple of Slovenes, who'd hiked here to deliver this book
     to me!! Do you know it? I've never seen the original, and the
     illustrations are fascinating. Though of course, I was familiar with
     some of them, notably the space station design.

Poto?nik's book introduced the first full concept of geostationary
telecommunication satellites, which originates from the ideas of Konstantin
Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky. The book later influenced such artistic works as
Clarke's one in the magazine Wireless World, 1945 and Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. A similar concept of a space station design has
been proposed by von Braun in 1953.

Tsiolkovsky's, Poto?nik's and Clarke's visions of geostationary
telecommunications satellites were made a reality in 1962 with the launch of
Telstar. American geostationary telecommunication satellite Syncom 2 in 1963
took exactly the same position, which had been calculated by Poto?nik.

Poto?nik died of pneumonia in great poverty at the age of 36 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 and nothing about his work about space. One street in
Graz now bears his name.

In 1999 an international memorial symposium of two days about his life and
work was held at the University of Maribor, celebrating the 70th anniversary
of the first printing of his famous book.

Von Braun at many occasions had stressed what is written also in French
encyclopedia Larousse that Poto?nik was his teacher in making of V1 and V2
rockets and afterwards of other space vehicles.