TOPIC: Flat Earth Theory - FE Hypothesis

Hermann Noordung's Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums, published here in English translation, was one of the classic writings about spaceflight. Its author, whose real name was Herman Potocnik, was an obscure former captain in the Austrian army who became an engineer. He was born on 22 December 1892 in Pola (later, Pula), the chief Austro-Hungarian naval station, located on the Adriatic in what is today Croatia. As the location might suggest in part, his father served in the navy as a staff medical officer. The name Potocnik is Slovenian, also the nationality of Herman's mother, who had some Czech ancestors as well. The young man was educated in various places in the Habsburg monarchy, attending an elementary school in Marburg (later, Maribor) in what is today Slovenia. He enrolled in military schools with emphases on science and mathematics as well as languages for his intermediate and secondary schooling, in the obscure town of Fischau, Lower Austria, and in Mährisch-Weißkirchen (later the Czech city of Hranice), respectively.

Following that, he attended the technical military academy in Mödling southwest of Vienna. Upon graduation, he received his commission as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served during World War I in a railroad (guard) regiment. From 1918 to 1922 he studied electrical engineering at the Technical Institute in Vienna, although tuberculosis had forced him to leave the army in 1919. While he appears to have set up a practice as an engineer, his illness evidently prevented him from working in that capacity. But he did become interested in the spaceflight movement. He contributed monetarily to the journal of the German Society for Space Travel (Verein für Raumschiffahrt or VfR), Die Rakete (The Rocket), begun in 1927, and he corresponded with Hermann Oberth (1894-1989), whose book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, published in 1923) essentially launched the spaceflight movement in Germany and laid the theoretical foundations for future space efforts there. Another correspondent was Baron Guido von Pirquet (1880-1966), who wrote a series of articles on interplanetary travel routes in Die Rakete during 1928 that suggested space stations as depots for supplying fuel and other necessaries to interplanetary rockets. The rockets, in his conception, would be launched from the stations rather than from the Earth to avoid the amounts of propellants required for escape from the home planet's gravitational field, which would be much weaker at the distance of a few hundred kilometers.

Oberth encouraged Potocnik to express his ideas about rocketry and space travel in a book, which he completed with its 100 illustrations in 1928. Potocnik's gratitude to Oberth and the enthusiasts around him in Germany led the still young but ailing engineer to assume the pen name of Noordung (referring to the German word for north, Nord) in honor of the fellow space enthusiasts to his north. He published the book with Richard Carl Schmidt & Co. in Berlin in 1929, only to die soon afterwards on 27 August 1929 of tuberculosis. (1)

Potocnik's book dealt, as its title suggests, with a broad range of topics relating to space travel, although the rocket motor that forms the book's subtitle was not especially prominent among them. What makes the book important in the early literature about space travel is its extensive treatment of the engineering aspects of a space station. Potocnik was hardly the first person to write about this subject, as the comment about Pirquet above would suggest. The idea in fictional form dates back to 1869-1870 when American minister and writer Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) published "The Brick Moon" serially in The Atlantic Monthly. The German mathematics teacher, philosopher, and historian of science Kurd Laßwitz (1848-1910) followed this up in 1897 with his novel Auf zwei Planeten (on two planets), which featured a Martian space station supported by antigravity that served as a staging point for space travel. (2) Two years before the appearance of Laßwitz's book, the earliest of the recognized pioneers of spaceflight theory, the Russian school teacher Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), published a work of science fiction entitled (in English translation) Reflections on Earth and Heaven and the Effects of Universal Gravitation (1895) in which he discussed asteroids and artificial satellites as bases for rocket launches. He also discussed the creation of artificial gravity on the man-made space stations through rotation. (3) Unlike Laßwitz, Tsiolkovsky was not content with science fiction, however. Between 1911 and 1926, the Russian spaceflight theorist expanded his ideas and subjected them to mathematical calculation. In the process, he elaborated a concept of a space station as a base for voyages into space but did not develop it in any detail. (4) Others in what was then the Soviet Union also developed ideas about space stations, (5) but they were little known in the West. Thus, for the development there of conceptions about space stations the writings of Oberth were much more important. The Romanian-German spaceflight theorist wrote briefly about "observation stations" in his 1923 book and discussed some of their possible uses such as observation and military reconnaissance of the Earth, service as a fueling station, and the like. (6) In the expanded and more popular version of his book published in 1929, Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (translated as Ways to Spaceflight), Oberth covered these ideas in more detail, but he devoted most of his attention to a space mirror that could reflect solar energy upon a single point on Earth or upon a wider region for keeping northern ports free of ice in winter, illuminating large cities at night, and other applications.

Roastie wrote:

I appreciate your encouragement in the face of such strong and misguided opposition. I'm not sure we go back for millennia or even close to that in fact? Heliocentrism in its current guise certainly doesn't go back beyond about 500 years, and only really took hold in the last hundred years through indoctrinated schooling, and the decline of western religions, as far as I'm able to tell. Having said that you're correct in thinking that our ancestors understood that the earth is a fixed stationary plane, as historical records plainly demonstrate. In fact it was a generally accepted fact up until recently even in Western civilisations.