Potochnik, Herman

After the death of his father (1894) he grew up in Marburg an der Drava ( Duchy of Styria ^[4] ). Later he studied (probably with the support of his uncle, Major-General of the ) in army schools in Moravia , in 1910-1913 - at the ^[5] in Medling , where he graduated with a degree in " construction of bridges and railways ”with an engineer degree in the rank of junior lieutenant .

In World War I he served in Galicia , Serbia and Bosnia ; in 1915 promoted to senior lieutenant . In 1919, he resigned as captain for health reasons ( tuberculosis ). He studied electrical engineering and mechanical engineering at the Vienna Technical University . Since 1925, he devoted himself to the problems of rocket science and space technology.

At the end of 1928, under the pseudonym Herman Nordung published the only book, The Problem of Overcoming Outer Space: The Rocket Engine ( German: Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums. Der Raketen-Motor ), which Berlin publisher Richard Karl Schmidt released with the official publication year 1929 .

Due to a chronic disease (tuberculosis), he remained single; lived with his brother Adolf in Vienna. He died in poverty in 1929, at the age of 36, from pneumonia. Obituaries published in the newspapers of Maribor noted his military and academic achievements, but not his work on space flight.

On 188 pages of his book, which contained 100 illustrations, G. Potochnik proposed options for creating space stations and geostationary satellites . He described in detail the space station, which consists of 3 modules connected by cable: a "living wheel", which had to constantly rotate to create artificial gravity , a power station that generates energy from solar radiation through a parabolic mirror , and an observatory .

The idea expressed by G. Potochnik of the so-called “stationary satellite” at an altitude of about 36,000 km, which can constantly hang above a certain point on the Earth, was later implemented in the form of telecommunication and meteorological satellites in geosynchronous orbit .

The book was translated into Russian (1935), Slovenian (1986) and English (1999, NASA ) languages.

The ideas of G. Potochnik were first supported in 1952 when Werner von Braun published the concept of an orbital station, which could be inspired by the circular shape proposed by G. Potochnik. The Russian edition of the book could affect the work of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev . On the contrary, in the Vienna environment of the author, the book was perceived as a series of fantasies.

• The name of G. Potochnik is one of the streets in Graz , the capital of Styria.
• The proposal in the 1990s to name the international space station named after G. Potochnik was not supported.
• On the 100th anniversary of G. Potochnik, a postage stamp was issued by Austrian post in 1992 ^[6] .
• In September 2012, in the community of ( Lower Styria , Slovenia ), where G. Potochnik’s grandmother and grandfather lived, with the assistance of the EU and the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia, the Cultural Center for European Space Technologies was as an art project that should be cultural issues of space flight ^[7] . The architecture of the building reproduces the first space station that man invented at a time when space exploration was still a dream ^[8] .

• Keimel R. Potočnik Hermann // Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815-1950 (ÖBL). - Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1983. - Bd. 8. - S. 232. - ISBN 3-7001-0187-2 .

• Diem P., Schinnerl I. Potočnik, Herman (German) . Austria-Forum. Date of treatment December 15, 2014.