Von Pirquet, Guido (1880–1966)
Talented Austrian engineer who carried out seminal studies of the most efficient
way for spacecraft to travel to the planets. Von Pirquet, a member of a
distinguished Austrian family (his brother Clemens was a world-renowned
physician), studied mechanical engineering at the Universities of Technology
in Vienna and Graz. His expertise in ballistics
and thermodynamics soon won him recognition
in European rocket circles. He was elected first secretary of the rocket
society founded by Franz von Hoefft and made
his most important contributions to rocketry through a 1928–29 series
of articles called "Travel Routes" in the German Rocket Society's
periodical Die Rakete (The Rocket) and a book Die Möglichkeit
der Weltraumfahrt (The Possibility of Space Travel) edited by the young
Willy Ley in 1928. In these writings he describes
the most fuel-efficient trajectories for reaching the planets Venus,
Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn). Through calculations of a rocket
nozzle for a manned rocket to Mars, he shows
that the rocket needed to liftoff directly from Earth would be too large
– the nozzle area of the first stage being about 1,500 square meters
– to be technically feasible; thus he concludes that a manned expedition
to Mars could only be accomplished by building a space
station in Earth orbit, where the spaceship for travel to Mars could
be assembled. His 1928 calculated trajectory for a space probe to reach
Venus is identical to the one used by the first Soviet interplanetary spacecraft
to Venus in 1961.
Reference
- von Pirquet, G. Various articles, Die Rakete, vol. II, 1928.
Related categories
• ROCKET
ENGINEERS AND SPACE SCIENTISTS
• HISTORY
OF ROCKETRY
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