|
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.
|