Herman Potočnik

Herman Potočnik was born on December 22, 1892, in Pola, then the Austro-Hungarian naval port on the Istrian peninsula and now the Croatian city of Pula. His father Jožef, a Slovenian naval surgeon, died in 1894, and the family moved to Maribor in Lower Styria. He attended military secondary schools in Fischau and Hranice and graduated as a lieutenant from the Imperial Technical Military Academy at Mödling in 1913.

During the First World War he served with the Austro-Hungarian railway and bridge-building corps on the Serbian, Galician, and Isonzo fronts, contracting tuberculosis in 1919. Discharged with the rank of captain, he enrolled in the electrical-engineering faculty of the Vienna University of Technology, completing a doctoral thesis on rocket propulsion under Friedrich Hartmann in 1925.

Writing under the pen name Hermann Noordung, he published Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums — Der Raketen-Motor (The Problem of Space Travel — The Rocket Motor) with Richard Carl Schmidt in Berlin in late 1928, dated 1929. The 188-page treatise was the first detailed engineering analysis of a permanent crewed orbital station. He proposed a wheel-shaped Wohnrad spinning about its hub to generate artificial gravity, paired with an observatory module and a power station, all stationed in geostationary orbit at roughly 35,900 kilometers — the first published identification of that orbit's usefulness for fixed observation. He worked out solar mirror power, vacuum heat radiators, airlocks, and the use of the rocket equation for orbital rendezvous.

His tuberculosis returned, and he died in poverty in Vienna on August 27, 1929, at age 36. Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stanley Kubrick all cited the Wohnrad as a direct influence.

The name Herman comes from the Old High German heri "army" and man "man," meaning "army man" or "warrior"; he wore it as a masculine name handed down from medieval Germanic Europe.