A

David

Darling

Ulinski, Franz Abdon (1890–1974)

Franz Ulinski was a technical officer in the aviation corps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire army during World War I who, around 1919, became the first to propose an ion rocket. Solar energy, he suggested, could be used to disintegrate atoms, and the charged fragments expelled to power a spacecraft. A year later, he published his ideas in a journal of aeronautics in Vienna, but they were too far ahead of theis time to be taken seriously.