Innovative People in Early Rocketry

Walter Hohmann, 1880–1945, born in Hardheim, Germany

Hohmann was a professional architect, but Hermann Oberth’s book on rocketry inspired him to dedicate his spare time to spaceflight theory. In 1925 he published The Attainability of the Heavenly Bodies. He calculated the minimum energy needed to transfer from one orbit to another. Today this trajectory is called the Hohmann transfer orbit in his honor. 

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, 1907–1966, born in Zhytomyr, Russia (today Ukraine)

As a rising star in aeronautical engineering, Korolev joined the Moscow GIRD, a rocket club, in 1931. By 1933, he was deputy chief of a new government rocket institute, where he oversaw the Soviet Union’s early liquid-propellant experiments. Arrested in 1938 during Stalin’s purges, he barely survived a Siberian concentration camp, then was held in various prisons until 1944. Korolev went on to manage the USSR’s ballistic missile program and directed its space program from Sputnik’s launch in 1957 until his death in 1966. 

Herman "Noordung" Potočnik, 1892–1929, born in Pola, Austria-Hungary (today Pula, Croatia)

A retired Austro-Hungarian army officer and engineer, Hermann Potočnik published his book The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor under the pseudonym Hermann Noordung in 1928–29. He proposed the concept of a doughnut-shaped space station 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter in Earth orbit. 

Nikolai Alekseevich Rynin, 1877–1942, born in Moscow, Russia

An engineer, Rynin took an early interest in advocating space exploration. In 1928 he published Interplanetary Communications, the first encyclopedia on the history and theory of rocket technology and spaceflight. Unlike his Soviet contemporaries, he maintained a vigorous correspondence with Western European and American space enthusiasts. 

Eugen Sänger, 1905–1964, born Preßnitz, Austria-Hungary (later Přísečnice, Czechoslovakia)

Trained as a civil and aeronautical engineer, Sänger focused on the concept of developing an aerospace plane that would operate both inside and outside the atmosphere. Although the faculty of Vienna’s Technical University rejected his ideas as too fanciful, he published Rocket Flight Technology in 1933. During World War II, Sänger worked with the German air force on rocket and ramjet technology. After the war he directed rocket engineering institutes in West Germany.

Hermann Ganswindt, 1856–1934, born in Voigtshof bei Seeburg, Germany (today Wójtówko, Poland)

An eccentric inventor, Ganswindt in 1891 proposed a space vehicle propelled by exploding charges. He understood Newton’s Third Law but did not equate his propulsion system with a rocket. He was perhaps the earliest person to propose a feasible means of spaceflight in print, but he was largely forgotten until German rocket enthusiasts rediscovered him in the 1920s. 

Phillip Ellaby Cleator, 1908–1994, born in Wallasey, United Kingdom

As a young office worker in the Liverpool area, Cleator was inspired by science fiction movies and news of the rocket societies, especially the American Interplanetary Society. He founded the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) in 1933. In 1936 he published the first book in Britain on the topic, Rockets Through Space: The Dawn of Interplanetary Travel. The BIS became the world’s most important space advocacy society from the mid-1930s on. 

Yuri Vasilievich Kondratyuk, 1897–1941, born in Poltava, Russia (today Ukraine)

Kondratyuk studied mathematics and physics at an early age and attended engineering school in St. Petersburg before World War I. He later joined Friedrich Tsander and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky to spread the idea of rocketry. He participated in engineering projects and discussed four-stage liquid-oxygen and hydrogen rockets and space elevators. 

Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie, 1881–1957, born in Paris, France

Esnault-Pelterie is best known for his pioneering contributions to aviation. In 1912 he wrote that spaceflight was possible, but only with nuclear propulsion. After hearing of other rocketry visionaries, he worked to popularize space travel ideas in France. In 1930 he published a major survey of the topic, L’Astronautique. 

Yakov Isidorovich Perel'man, 1882–1942,born in Byelostok, Russia (today Białystok, Poland)

Perel’man spread the word about rocketry and spaceflight to a Russian audience years ahead of Western Europe. Before World War I, he began to popularize Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s ideas in science works for the general public. In 1915 he published Interplanetary Journeys, the first book in the world on the science and technology of spaceflight. 

Willy Ley, 1906–1969, born in Berlin, Germany

Ley studied zoology and other sciences before taking an interest in rocketry. His first book, published in 1926, popularized Hermann Oberth. A founding member of the German spaceflight society, he advised filmmaker Fritz Lang, produced a pioneering space fiction film in Woman in the Moon 1929. To escape the Nazis, Ley emigrated in 1935 to the United States, where he became a famous science writer and space travel promoter.