The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

472 Von Kármán, Theodore
liquid-fueled sounding rocket called the RH-I (RH for
“Repulsion Hoefft”), which would be carried to a height of
5 to 10 km by balloon and then launched. Such rockets, he
explained, could be used for delivering mail or photographic
remote sensing of Earth. By stages, their capacity
would be increased. RH-V, for example, would be able to
fly around the Earth in elliptical orbits, yet take off and
land on water like a plane. The ultimate development, the
RH-VIII, would be launched from a space station and be
able to reach other planets or even leave the Solar System.
Von Kármán, Theodore (1881–1963)
A Hungarian aerodynamicist who founded an Aeronautical
Institute at Aachen before World War I and achieved
a world-class reputation in aeronautics through the
1920s. In 1930, Robert Millikan and his associates at the
California Institute of Technology lured von Kármán
from Aachen to become the director of Caltech’s
Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT). There
he trained a generation of engineers in theoretical aerodynamics
and fluid dynamics. With its eminence in
physics, physical chemistry, and astrophysics, as well as
aeronautics, it proved to be an ideal site for the early
development of U.S. ballistic rocketry. Von Kármán was
the first chairman of the Advisory Group on Aeronautical
Research and Development for NATO. 133
Von Opel, Fritz (1899–1971)
A German automotive industrialist who took part, with
Max Valier and Friedrich Wilhelm Sander, in experiments
with rocket propulsion for automobiles and aircraft.
The world’s first rocket-propelled car, the Opel-Rak
1, was initially tested on March 15, 1928. Opel himself
test-drove an improved version, the Opel-Rak 2, on May
23 of that year. On September 30, 1929, Opel piloted the
second rocket airplane to fly, a Hatry glider fitted with 16
solid-fuel rockets.
Von Pirquet, Guido (1880–1966)
A 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
1928–1929 series of articles called “Travel Routes” in the
Verein für Raumschiffarht’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 fuelefficient
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
would be impossibly large if it had to fly directly from the
Earth’s surface—the nozzle area of the first stage being
about 1,500 square meters. He concludes that a manned
expedition to Mars could be achieved only by building the
spacecraft at a space station in Earth orbit. His 1928 calculated
trajectory for a space probe to Venus is identical to
the one used by the first Soviet interplanetary spacecraft to
Venus in 1961. 307
Vortex
See Chalet.
Voskhod
A multiseater Soviet spacecraft hurriedly adapted from
Vostok in order to upstage the two-man American Gemini
program. Only two Voskhod (“sunrise”) flights were
Voskhod The never-flown Voshkod 3 spacecraft on display in
the RKK Energia museum. Joachim Becker