POTOČNIK, Hermann (NOORDUNG)

P's father Jožef (1841-94), a high-ranking naval officer, was born near Slovenj Gradec, whilst his mother Minka, née Kokošinek, came from the outskirts of Maribor. After his father's death, the family moved to Maribor. P. went to the gymnasium in Hranice (Moravia), and between 1910 and 1913 attended the military academy at Wiener Neustadt. As an exemplary lieutenant, and an expert in the construction of bridges and railways, he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1915. During WWI he was first stationed in Serbia, transferred to Galicia and then back to Serbia and Bosnia until he was sent to the Isonzo Front where he experienced a breakthrough to the river Piava.
Due to contracting tuberculosis, he was pensioned off from the military in 1919 with the rank of captain. The following year he enrolled at the University of Technology in Vienna to study mechanical engineering. As a student he was a member of the university's aero club and was particularly interested in the fledgling field of rocketry, which he fully engaged in after his degree in 1925.
Owing to the effects of his illness, he couldn't find an employment and lived in poverty with his brother Adolf, in Vienna. His ideas of how to breakthrough into space were far ahead of his time and only accepted by a small group of people, including Hermann Oberth, and this stimulated P. to take the pseudonym, Noordung.
Shortly before his death he published a book under this name. In its first part, he addressed the issue of rocket propulsion which was, in his opinion, the only way to enter into space. In later chapters, he deals in detail with various rocket constructions and descriptions of the flight stages involved from launching, through space flight and landing back on the Earth. P. also described re-usable spacecraft and rocket-like craft, aimed at intercontinental flight through Earth’s stratosphere.
He was the first to calculate the parameters for geostationary satellites with angular frequencies that fit those of the Earth so that the satellites would orbit our planet above the same fixed point along the equator at the height of about 36,000 km. Such satellites have orbited the Earth since 1963, and have become an indispensable part of global communications.
P. also had a vision for his idea of utopia - a space station with a human crew aboard a 30-metre diameter ring which would turn around its central axis every eight seconds and by the use of the ring's centrifugal force, generate artificial gravity. Such a space station would house an observatory and a power station transforming solar energy into electricity, as well as serve as a stopover during long distance space travel. In addition to writing about space flights to the Moon and the nearest planets, P. also addressed travelling to more distant planets, and ultimately to the stars, that would be reached by large spacecraft where several generations would live and die by the time of arrival at these very distant destinations. Such craft would be propelled by atomic or photon energy.
As a humanist, P. dealt with the potential risks of space conquest, and in his opinion the benefits of observing Earth from space outweighed the potential risks. He believed in the possibility of populating distant celestial bodies at sometime in the future.
His slim book had only 120 text pages and 100 illustrations, but in 1938 it was already in its second reprint, and by 1993 the third reprint was issued, in Vienna. It was also translated into Russian, Slovenian (1986) and the English (1995) for use by NASA. According to Wernher von Braun, P’s book was a textbook for numerous generations of rocket engineers.