HERMANN NOORDUNG WOHNRAD

(1929)


By Rob Arndt



Hermann Noordung (born Herman Potoènik)  served in World War I  for the Austrian Army in Galicia, Serbia, and Bosnia. He was promoted to the rank of Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) in 1915 and was assigned to the SW front of the Soca battlefield and reached the Piava River before the Austrian Army retreat.



Hermann Oberth



Early German rocketry with Hermann Oberth near rocket

After the war he was pensioned off by the Austrian Army as a Captain due to the tuberculosis he got in the war. He subsequently studied electrical and mechanical engineering at the University of Technology in Vienna, becoming an engineer. Inspired by the writings of Hermann Oberth on space flight by 1925 he had devoted himself to rocketry and became a specialist in that area.




Fritz Lang’s “Frau im Mond”









Hermann Oberth has been considered by many to have been the original father of modern rocketry, having designed rockets and space stations from WW1 through the 1920s.

One of his rockets was featured in a popular German science fiction film, “Frau im Mond” (Woman in the Moon).

The “Friede” rocket in that film was personally designed by Oberth and this led to many inspirations for German rocket development that reached viability with the Nazi regime. Noordung surely got his inspiration from Oberth.



 





In 1927 the German film-maker Fritz Lang released his extraordinary futuristic vision Metropolis, so rocketry received a terrific boost when he announced that his next production would deal with space flight.


Willy Ley, one of the advisers to the film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) recalled that 'a Fritz Lang film on space travel could scarcely be surpassed for spreading the idea. it is almost impossible to convey what magic that name had in Germany at that time'.


Lang also paid Hermann Oberth to build a real liquid-fuelled rocket which, it was hoped, would be launched to high altitude as the film was released.


Oberth was unable to engineer a practical rocket in time, and following an explosion which nearly cost his eyesight, suffered a nervous breakdown and left Munich before the film premiere. However, the propaganda influence of the film was still powerful and Oberth's assistant Rudolf Nebel went on to work with the young Wernher von Braun at the Raketenflugplatz - a test field started by Nebel near Berlin.

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One of the details of FRAU IM MOND would have a lasting influence. As the Moon rocket neared the moment of launch, a loudspeaker announced: "Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ... zero ... FIRE!" Lang had invented the "countdown", if only for dramatic effect. The effect was so dramatic that rocket men have kept the tradition to this day.

 




Inspirational Oberth “Friede” rocket from “Frau im Mond” film

Four years later in 1929 he published a book Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums (roughly translated as “The Problem of Reaching Space”). In his book he devoted much of its space to his personal concept of a “Wohnrad” (Living Wheel) which could reach space and serve as an orbiting disc space station.


 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




 

Detailed Wohnrad diagram from Noordung's book


Bottom view of Wohnrad with human scale in view


 


It was von Braun who designed both the A-11 rocket for the purpose of launching a satellite and a less complicated circular space station.

Neither were built as the V-2 program became Germany‘s top wartime priority. Von Braun’s A-11 concept was nowhere near construction, not even the second stage A-10.




The projected A-11 three stage satellite launcher






























 



A-9/A-10/A-11
Illustration by von Braun, Fort Bliss 1946

The Wohnrad itself would have an outer diameter of 164 feet and would rotate about its axis in order to create artificial gravity in the inhabitable outer ring. This would contain strong airlocks, bulkheads, cabins, workshops, laboratories, kitchen, and bathroom… plus a circular gallery with portholes to view the Earth and stars.

 

The station’s power source was solar and would be provided by two large concave mirrors to focus solar radiation onto massive heat pipes containing a liquid that would vaporize and drive turbines to produce continual electrical current. The vapor would condense in other pipes shaded from the sun. His Wohnrad had been a more refined space station concept than Oberth’s 1924 proposal, so it held great promise.



Noordung Wohnrad in space

But on August 29, 1929 Hermann Noordung unfortunately died in Vienna at the age of 36 from pneumonia.

His work was translated into various languages [electronic English version on web] and gave inspiration to Nazi Germany in particular with the VFR (Verein für Raumschiffahrt or German Rocket Society) with which both Oberth and von Braun further developed their own space flight ideas.

There is no doubt that had Noordung lived during the time Austria was annexed he would have been at the center of German rocket development at Peenemünde and may have been forced to use his design for more practical war weapons as von Braun was forced to do with the V-2 rocket with plans for the ICBM A-9/A-10. Noordung’s circular solar wheel could have been adapted into one of the various SS Technical Branch disc projects with perhaps spectacular results. The Nazis through Noordung might have allowed Germany to be the first nation to deploy geo-synchronous satellites around the world as well as the highly impractical Sonnenlinse (a bizarre experimental solar blinding device that was captured by US forces in testing stage in 1945). But it wasn’t meant to be.



Artist impression of Wohnrad with space mirrors deployed



Von Braun shortly after
his surrender in 1945

In the end all of the pioneering work of Oberth, Noordung, and von Braun was turned over to the United States for further development.

The Wohnrad concept may have inspired von Braun’s 1945 and 1952 space stations promoted by Stanley Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” but the disc space station has yet to be built as mankind still clings to wasteful rocketry and modular stations of limited durability.



1945 Von Braun Space Station sketched for the US Army in 1946



                         Von Braun '50s concept space station


 

Space Station V  from movie "2001: A Space Odyssey"




 


Von Braun 1953 Space Shuttle Design



 

 

 

 




 




 
Von Braun VTO Interceptor
Art by Joshua Hildwine 

 
 

 

 


 





 

 
Von Braun VTO Interceptor
Art by Kyle Scott




Below, you will find an obscure late 1940s image taken from the Boeing Historical Archive. It is an artist's impression from North American Aviation that strongly resembles work performed in Nazi Germany by EMW at Peenemünde concerning manned versions of the V-2 missile.

 

The image was on microfilm and labeled "Rocket plane launch on V-2" and has been photographed and digitally enhanced.

 

When one considers von Braun's theoretical work on his VTO interceptor and the laborious work by EMW to design functional models of just such a radical manned missile, it is not hard to believe that North American produced this crude design with two MG or cannon ports in the nose and a general streamlining of the missile with highly swept-back wings as a postwar derivative of German aeronautical design concepts from 1945.

 

North American's study from their archives were transferred to Boeing and that is where this oddity was located.

 



North American Aviation V-2-Launched Rocket Powered Interceptor of the late 1940s
A Wernher von Braun design?


Peenemünde Manned V-2 project - the EMW A-9

 

Although the North American V-2 launched rocket interceptor concept is intriguing, it is far from original. It seems to be a merging of the von Braun Interceptor design above and the earliest concepts of a manned V-2 as both a reconnaissance plane and intercontinental manned missile meant to strike New York City in late 1945.



Original plan for manned A-9 in 1944




Internal schematic




Profile published in the January 1946 issue of the French publication Revue Aeronautique (Aeronautical Review)




~ Rob Arndt




Britain's Mystery Manned V-2 Concept:
How Space History Could Have Been Altered

 

After Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, Britain, the United States, and U.S.S.R. captured a huge amount of German war documents and scientists involved with the V-2 project which bombarded London from late 1944 to early 1945 and Antwerp in 1945.



British Manned V-2

Information on the V-2 missile was put to good use by the victorious US and Soviet Union for further development towards military missiles and early spaceflight. Britain, however, lacked the resources to match the two postwar superpowers as Britain won the war, but had to rebuild and pay back immense war debts to the United States.

 

However, a British independent proposal put forward just one year after the war, if it had been properly developed, could have altered the history of space exploration as we know it.

A two-man study group (R.A. Smith and H. E. Ross) of the British Interplanetary Society submitted a private design for an adapted German V-2 rocket to the Ministry of Supply on December 23, 1946. The civilian adaption consisted of a new pressurized cabin in the nose of the rocket, in place of the usual explosive 1,000 kg amatol warhead, which would enable a man to be launched as a passenger on the flight. The cabin was to be detachable, allowing the astronaut to experience several minutes of weightlessness, before it parachuted back to Earth.

Due to lack of funding, however, the proposal was not adopted as fate would have it. Britain was still in the reconstruction phase in 1946 from all the war damage caused during the previous years by the Luftwaffe and V-Weapons campaign.

The concept, however, is almost identical to that used by NASA in 1961, when US Astronauts Alan Sheppard and Gus Grissom were sent on sub-orbital flights with a Redstone rocket (ironically derived from the V-2), going through several minutes of weightlessness.

Had the British succeeded in their manned V-2 and had both the resources and Ministry funding, the first moon rocket might have been named Brittania or Victoria and the Union Flag might have been planted on the moon instead of the Stars & Stripes.

~Rob Arndt