The First Steps Of Spacecraft Propulsion Can Trace Their Roots In Late Medieval Transylvania
Just as I recently wrote in a separate article on The Dockyards, pioneering rocket propulsion was done in the Principality of Transylvania at some point during the late Middle Ages/Renaissance period.
An Austrian-born Transylvanian Saxon by the name Conrad Haas, who was formerly a military engineer for the Imperial Austrian army under Emperor Ferdinand I of the Holy Roman Empire, was invited to settle in the city of Hermannstadt (present-day Sibiu) by the then Grand Prince of Transylvania, Stephen Báthory.
Subsequently, he wrote an important manuscript in the German language which details the usages of early rockets and their afferent fuels. He stressed in his work the usage of liquid fuel and how to connect different mixtures of such fuel to the rockets. Haas also managed to design early prototypes of two-stage and three-stage rockets during the late 16th century. Below is depicted an illustration from the Sibiu manuscript (as Conrad Haas' main work is also credited).
All this early scientific legacy would be later on discovered in the public records of the city of Sibiu (the title of Conrad Haas' volume of research being known as 'Varia II 374'). In this particular respect, it's quite impressive and commending what he noted in the last chapter of his documentation:
'[…] But my advice is for more peace and no war, leaving the rifles calmly in storage, so the bullet is not fired, the gunpowder is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his money, the arsenal master his life; that is the advice Conrad Haas gives.’
Nowadays, a street in Sibiu, southern Transylvania, Romania bears his name and a booster rocket projected by the ARCA Space Corporation was named in his honour. So it is that the HAAS booster rocket was conceived in order to transport artificial satellites in the outer space. Below is a 3D model of the aforementioned type of space rocket.
Documentation sources and external links:
- http://www.inverse.com/article/11112-how-16th-century-inventors-kickstarted-the-space-race
- http://austrian-space-pioneers.at/pioneers.php?wert=Pioneers/Haas
- http://weebau.com/history/haas.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Haas
First image source: The Dockyards via Wikimedia Commons (under CC0 licence; public domain file)
Second image source: Wikimedia Commons (under CC0 licence; public domain file)
Chinese used rocket artillery centuries earlier.
Excellent Post , Thank You, very informative.