Noordung's rotating space station (Potočnik)
Estación espacial giratoria de Noordung (Potočnik)
- Date
- 1928-1929 · confidence high
- Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Credited to
- Herman Potočnik (Hermann Noordung)
- Field
- Movement
What it is
A book in which the Slovene engineer describes in technical detail a wheel-shaped space station that rotates to create artificial gravity, placed in geostationary orbit with habitation, observation and power modules.
It was published in Berlin in 1929 under the pseudonym 'Hermann Noordung'; Potočnik, born in Pula, lived and wrote in Vienna (the place is approximate). Tsiolkovsky had already described something like a geostationary orbit in 1895; Clarke developed its use in communications in 1945.
What it led to
- artificial gravity by rotation in the projects of von Braun and Clarke
- the station design in '2001: A Space Odyssey'
- the concept of the geostationary orbit before Clarke (1945)