By Hermann Noordung, Herman Potocnik Potocnik
This is often an English translation of Noordung's 'Das challenge der Befahrung des Weltraums'. it's a a part of the NASA historical past sequence. The publication presents Noordung's perception as to how an area station should be constructed.
Hermann Noordung's Das challenge der Bejahrung des Weltraums, released the following in English translation, was once one of many vintage writings approximately spaceflight. Its writer, whose actual identify was once Herman Potocnik, used to be an captain within the Austrian military who grew to become an engineer. He used to be born on 22 December 1892 in Pola, the manager Austro-Hungarian naval station, situated at the Adriatic in what's this present day Croatia.
After engineering institution he did develop into attracted to the spaceflight move. He corresponded with Hermann Oberth (1894-1989), whose publication Die Rakele zu den Planetenraurnen (The Rocket into Interplanetary house, 1923) primarily introduced the spaceflight move in Germany and laid the theoretical foundations for destiny house efforts there.
Oberth inspired Potocnik to precise his rules approximately rocketry and area trip in a ebook, which he accomplished with its a hundred illustrations in 1928. Potocnik's gratitude to Oberth and the fans round him in Germany led the nonetheless younger yet sick engineer to imagine the pen identify of Noordung (referring to the German notice for north, Nord) in honor of the man house fans to his north. He released the publication with Richard Carl Schmidt & Co. in Berlin in 1929, purely to die quickly afterwards in 1929 of tuberculosis.
Potocnik's publication dealt, as its name indicates, with a wide variety of subject matters with regards to area commute, even if the rocket motor that kinds the book's subtitle used to be now not specially well-liked between them. What makes the publication very important within the early literature approximately area trip is its broad therapy of the engineering elements of an area station. Potocnik was once not often the 1st individual to put in writing approximately this topic. the assumption in fictional shape dates again to 1869-1870 whilst American minister and author Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) released "The Brick Moon" serially within the Atlantic per month. The German arithmetic instructor, thinker, and historian of technology Kurd Lafsswitz (1848-1910) this up in 1897 together with his novel Auf zwei Planeten (translated into English as "Two Planets" in 1971), which featured a Martian area station supported through antigravity.
Space historians have steered that Potocnik's ebook shaped the root for a plotless brief tale entitled "Lunetta" that Wernher von Braun wrote in 1929, describing a visit to an area station.
If right, this speculation may recommend a major hyperlink within the evolution approximately principles for an area station. As is widely known, von Braun - technical director of the German rocket improvement middle at Peenemttnde that constructed the V-2 ballistic missile in the course of global struggle II and later director of NASA's Marshall area Flight heart whereas it constructed the Saturn V rocket - wrote a piece of writing for the preferred Collier's journal in 1952 during which he defined an area station at the least superficially just like Potocnik's. this text, others within the eight-part Collier's sequence of which it used to be a component, and a Walt Disney tv sequence, guy in house, within which von Braun, Ley, and others seemed, helped identify the yankee renowned photograph of an area station and of house exploration in addition to a imaginative and prescient of an area station that, in Howard McCurdy's phrases, "would proceed to lead NASA procedure during the many years ahead." As McCurdy additionally said, "More than the other individual, von Braun will be accountable for clarifying within the American brain the connection among area stations and area exploration. " hence, if Potocnik certainly prompted von Braun, in the course of the latter he should also have inspired the USA and NASA.
168 pages; over 100 photographs drawings, illustrations and charts.
This is a Print copy that keeps the formatting and format of the unique variation and gives a number of the merits of ordinary Kindle books.
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Extra info for The Problem of Space Travel. The Rocket Motor
Sample text
It is completely zero as soon as the vehicle comes to rest during an operating propulsion. This can be mathematically verified in a simple manner, something we want to do here by taking into consideration the critical importance of the question of efficiency for the rocket vehicle. If the general expression for efficiency is employed in the present case: “Ratio of the energy gained to the energy expended”, then the following formula5 is arrived at as an expression for the efficiency of the reaction ηr as a function of the instantaneous ratio between travel velocity v and the velocity of Energy gained = Energy expended – Energy lost v ) vηr= Energy repulsion c.
In my opinion, however, we should come closest to the actually attainable velocity in practice when assuming an ideal highest velocity of approximately 12,500 meters per second. General Comments About the Structure of the Space Rocket Regardless of how the ascent proceeds, it requires very significant accelerations in every case, such that the vehicle attains a velocity of a projectile at an altitude of several kilometers. This condition – because of the thick density of the deepest layers of air closest to the surface of the Earth – results in the air drag reaching undesirably high values in the very initial phases of the ascent, something that is particularly true for space rockets without people on board.
This requires, however, that the projectile must have already attained a velocity of not less than around 12,000 meters per second when leaving The Reactive Force 59 the ground if, besides the lifting energy, the energy for overcoming air drag is also taken into account. Even if the means of present day technology would allow a giant cannon of this type to be built and to dare firing its projectile into space (as Professor H. Lorenz in Danzig has verified, we in reality do not currently have a propellant that would be sufficiently powerful for this purpose) – the result of this effort would not compensate for the enormous amounts of money required to this end1.