Herman Potočnik
Based on Wikipedia: Herman Potočnik
In 1928, a dying man living in poverty in Vienna published a book containing one hundred hand-drawn illustrations of humanity's future in space. He designed a wheel-shaped space station that would spin to create artificial gravity. He described how astronauts could observe Earth from orbit for both peaceful and military purposes. He warned about the destructive potential of these technologies even as he invented them.
He was thirty-five years old. He had tuberculosis. He would be dead within a year.
His name was Herman Potočnik, though he published under the mysterious pseudonym Hermann Noordung. His book, "The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor," would go on to influence nearly every serious space program of the twentieth century, from the Soviet Union's early rockets to Stanley Kubrick's vision of space stations in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Yet when he died, the obituary in his hometown newspaper mentioned only his military rank and his illness. Not a word about his work on space.
A Child of Empire
Herman Potočnik was born on December 22, 1892, in Pola, a naval port city on the Adriatic coast. Today this city is called Pula and belongs to Croatia, but in 1892 it was part of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, a polyglot realm that stretched from the Alps to the Carpathians.
His family was Slovenian. His father Jožef served as both a doctor and a naval officer at the Pola harbor, and had participated in one of the last great naval battles fought with wooden ships. In 1866, at the Second Battle of Vis, the Austrian Navy under Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff defeated the Italian Royal Navy using the ancient tactic of ramming enemy vessels. It was a decisive victory that secured Austrian control of the Adriatic.
But Herman would barely know his father. Jožef died in 1894, when Herman was only two years old. His mother Minka gathered her four children and moved the family inland to Maribor, a Slovenian city nestled among vineyards. She came from a family of Czech immigrants who had made their fortune manufacturing crucibles for glassmaking. Her father was a prominent wine merchant and local councilor.
Herman grew up in Maribor with his two older brothers, Adolf and Gustav, both of whom would become naval officers like their father, and his sister Frančiška. Some accounts suggest he also spent time in the nearby village of Vitanje, where his mother's family had roots. It was a childhood split between the cosmopolitan culture of a fading empire and the rural traditions of Slovenia.
The Making of a Military Engineer
The Potočnik family had military connections. Herman's uncle Heinrich rose to the rank of major general in the army, and likely helped secure Herman's admission to the elite military technical schools of the empire. After primary school in Maribor, Herman attended military secondary schools in Fischau and then in Hranice, a garrison town in Moravia.
From 1910 to 1913, he studied at the Imperial and Royal Technical Military Academy in Mödling, just south of Vienna. This was one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the empire, training officers to build the infrastructure of modern warfare. Herman specialized in the construction of railways and bridges, the arteries and crossing points that determined whether armies could move and resupply.
He graduated as an engineer second lieutenant, a young officer with technical expertise, just in time for the catastrophe that would destroy the world he had been trained to serve.
War and Its Aftermath
When World War One erupted in 1914, Herman Potočnik was sent to fight. He served in Galicia, the easternmost province of Austria-Hungary, where the imperial army clashed with Russian forces across vast plains. He fought in Serbia, where the war had begun with an assassination. He served in Bosnia, another piece of the imperial patchwork.
By 1915, he had been promoted to First Lieutenant, the German rank of Oberleutnant. He was then assigned to the southwestern front, along the Soča River, which the Italians called the Isonzo. This was one of the most brutal battlefields of the war, where Italian and Austro-Hungarian forces fought twelve separate battles over the same mountainous terrain between 1915 and 1917.
Potočnik witnessed both triumph and disaster there. He experienced the breakthrough when Austrian forces, reinforced by German troops using new infiltration tactics, shattered the Italian lines and pushed all the way to the Piave River. He also experienced the retreat when the front stabilized and the gains proved impossible to hold.
But the war took something from him that no victory could restore. Somewhere in the trenches, the mud, the crowded barracks, Herman Potočnik contracted tuberculosis.
In 1919, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone, carved into new nation-states. The Austrian military that remained had no use for a tubercular captain. Potočnik was pensioned off at the age of twenty-six, his military career over before it had properly begun.
A Second Education
What does a trained military engineer do when the military no longer wants him and the empire he served no longer exists?
Potočnik went back to school. He enrolled in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Technology in Vienna, focusing on electrical engineering. This was a field undergoing revolutionary change in the 1920s. Radio was transforming communication. Electrical power was reshaping industry. For a mind drawn to the cutting edge of technology, it was the right place to be.
He earned his doctorate in engineering. But his health continued to deteriorate. The tuberculosis that had ended his military career made it impossible to hold a regular job. He never married. He lived with his brother Adolf in Vienna, dependent on his military pension and his brother's support.
From 1925 onward, despite his illness or perhaps because of it, Potočnik devoted himself entirely to a single obsession: the problems of rocket science and space technology.
The Problem of Space Travel
To understand what Potočnik accomplished, you need to understand the state of space thinking in the 1920s. Rockets existed, but they were toys and weapons, not vehicles for exploration. The idea of traveling to space was considered science fiction, the province of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, not serious engineers.
A few visionaries disagreed. In Russia, a deaf schoolteacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had been working out the mathematics of space travel since the 1890s. In Germany and Austria, Hermann Oberth published "The Rocket into Planetary Space" in 1923, arguing that spaceflight was technically feasible. In America, Robert Goddard was building and launching small liquid-fueled rockets, though his work was largely ignored or mocked.
Potočnik entered this small community of dreamers and made a unique contribution. While others focused on the rocket itself, how to generate enough thrust to escape Earth's gravity, Potočnik focused on what would happen after you got there. What would a permanent human presence in space actually look like?
His book appeared at the end of 1928, though the publisher printed 1929 as the publication date to keep it looking fresh throughout the coming year. The German title was "Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums – der Raketen-Motor," which translates to "The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor." In 188 pages, illustrated with one hundred detailed drawings that Potočnik made by hand, he laid out a comprehensive vision for humanity's expansion into orbit.
The Space Station Wheel
The most influential part of Potočnik's book was his design for a space station. He imagined a wheel-shaped structure that would rotate to create artificial gravity through centrifugal force.
This is the same principle that keeps water in a bucket when you swing it in a circle over your head. The rotation pushes everything outward, toward the rim of the wheel. Stand on the inner surface of that rim, and you would feel a force pulling you toward the floor, just like gravity on Earth.
Potočnik worked out the details with an engineer's precision. How fast would the wheel need to spin? How large would it need to be for the rotation to feel natural rather than disorienting? What materials would it require? How would it be assembled in orbit?
He also thought about what such a station would be used for. Scientific experiments would benefit from the unique conditions of space: the vacuum, the intense sunlight, the ability to observe Earth from above. He described how orbiting spacecraft could provide detailed observation of the ground below, useful for both peaceful purposes like weather monitoring and military purposes like reconnaissance.
This last point troubled him. Potočnik expressed strong doubts about the potentially destructive military applications of the technologies he was describing. He could see where this was heading, and he was not entirely comfortable with it.
Noordung: The Puzzle of the Name
Potočnik published under the pseudonym Hermann Noordung, and no one is entirely certain why he chose this name.
One theory connects it to the German word "Ordnung," meaning order. The prefix "N" could be read as a negation, making "Noordung" mean something like "no order" or "disorder" or "chaos." Perhaps Potočnik, watching the ordered world of the Habsburg Empire dissolve into the chaos of successor states and economic depression, was making a quiet comment on his times.
Or perhaps he simply wanted to separate his speculative work from his identity as a trained military engineer. Or perhaps he had some other reason entirely, now lost to history.
Reception and Influence
In Vienna, the established engineering community dismissed Potočnik's book as fantasy. Respectable engineers did not waste time on space travel.
But elsewhere, people were paying attention. In Germany, amateur rocket enthusiasts had formed the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, which translates to the Spaceflight Society, usually abbreviated VfR. These hobbyists took Potočnik's ideas seriously. Among them was Hermann Oberth, whose own work Potočnik had built upon, and a young enthusiast named Wernher von Braun.
The book was quickly translated into other languages. An American science fiction magazine called Science Wonder Stories published a partial English translation in three parts during the summer of 1929, crediting the work to "Captain Hermann Noordung, A.D., M.E., Berlin." A complete Russian translation appeared in early 1935, where it may have influenced Sergei Korolev, who would later lead the Soviet space program.
Potočnik did not live to see any of this.
Death and Legacy
On August 27, 1929, Herman Potočnik died of pneumonia in Vienna. He was thirty-six years old and living in poverty. His brother Adolf survived him. His book had been published less than a year earlier.
The obituary that appeared in a Maribor newspaper mentioned his rank of captain and his engineering degree. It noted his long illness. It said nothing about rockets or space stations or the future of humanity among the stars.
But his ideas did not die with him. In 1952, Wernher von Braun, now working for the American government, published a series of articles in Collier's magazine describing his vision for space exploration. His space station design was a wheel, clearly descended from Potočnik's original concept. Von Braun saw orbiting stations as stepping stones to the Moon and Mars.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released "2001: A Space Odyssey," featuring the iconic Space Station V, a massive rotating wheel where passengers experience artificial gravity. The lineage from Potočnik's hand-drawn illustrations to that spinning station on the movie screen is direct and traceable.
The concept of geostationary satellites, spacecraft that orbit at exactly the right altitude and speed to remain fixed over one point on Earth's surface, had first been proposed by Tsiolkovsky. Potočnik discussed these satellites and how they might communicate with ground stations using radio. He did not, however, take the final step of imagining them as telecommunications relays for broadcasting. That insight would come from Arthur C. Clarke in 1945, and today the geostationary orbit is sometimes called the Clarke orbit in his honor.
Remembering Potočnik
In the decades since his death, Herman Potočnik has received increasing recognition, particularly in Slovenia, which claims him as a native son.
Streets in both Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, and Graz, the Austrian city near the Slovenian border, now bear his name. In 1999, on the seventieth anniversary of his book's publication, the University of Maribor hosted a two-day international symposium examining his life and work.
That same year, astronomers at the Črni Vrh Observatory in Slovenia discovered a small asteroid and named it 19612 Noordung in his honor. Somewhere out there, a chunk of rock circles the sun carrying the name of a man who dreamed of humanity's future in space.
In 2006, the Herman Potočnik Noordung Memorial Centre was built in Vitanje, the village where he may have spent part of his childhood. In 2012, the village went further, constructing the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies, an architectural project inspired by Potočnik's vision.
There was even a proposal in the late 1990s to name the International Space Station after him. It was not adopted, but the fact that it was seriously considered shows how far his reputation has traveled from that dismissive reception in 1920s Vienna.
The Problem of Living in Space
Potočnik's core insight remains relevant today. Getting to space is only the first problem. Living there is the second, and in many ways the harder one.
Without gravity, the human body deteriorates. Muscles atrophy because they have nothing to work against. Bones lose density because the skeleton no longer needs to support weight. Fluids shift toward the head, causing pressure problems. Astronauts on the International Space Station exercise for hours every day and still return to Earth weakened.
Potočnik's solution, a rotating structure that creates artificial gravity through centrifugal force, remains one of the most promising approaches to this problem. We have never built such a station, partly because of the engineering challenges and partly because of the cost. But as humanity contemplates longer missions to Mars and beyond, the problem Potočnik identified in 1928 becomes increasingly urgent.
A dying man in Vienna, pensioned out of a dissolved empire's army, living on his brother's charity, understood something essential about humanity's future in space. He wrote it down, illustrated it with a hundred careful drawings, and published it for anyone who would listen.
Then he died, and the world eventually caught up with him.