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A German rocket engineer who was a prominent member of the Verein
für Raumschiffahrt (German Rocket Society) in the late 1920s. His book Die
Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (The Attainability of Celestial Bodies),
published in 1925, was so technically advanced that it was consulted decades later
by NASA when planning its first interplanetary probes. In it, he describes his
"power tower" spacecraft, a huge cone-shaped rocket with an egg-shaped manned
capsule at the top, and, more importantly, the interplanetary transfer orbits
that have been named after him (see Hohmann orbit).
He also wrote popular works in the field of rocketry, as did his contemporaries
Willy Ley and Max Valier.
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