Walter Hohmann

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Walter Hohmann on a memorial stone at the Walter Hohmann observatory in Essen, which was unveiled for the 25th anniversary of the observatory

Walter Hohmann (born March 18, 1880 in Hardheim in the Odenwald ; † March 11, 1945 in Essen ) was a German urban planning officer and space pioneer.

Life

Hohmann was the son of a doctor. He spent his childhood in Hardheim and Port Elizabeth in South Africa . From 1891 on he attended the humanistic grammar school in Würzburg . After graduating from high school in 1900, he studied civil engineering at the Technical University in Munich until 1904 . After completing his studies, he worked from 1904 to 1912 as a test engineer for structural engineering in Vienna , Berlin , Hanover and Breslau . Among other things, he is responsible for the statics of the ferris wheel in the Vienna Praterand a suspension bridge over the Hudson River . In 1912, as a city planning officer in Essen, he became head of the structural engineering department of the Essen construction police and founded the material testing center of the city of Essen. In 1916 he submitted his dissertation Attempts on the interaction of old and new concrete in reinforced concrete structures at RWTH Aachen University , but due to the war and post-war conditions at the time, the doctorate did not take place until 1920. On July 20, 1933, he was appointed head of the examination office for static calculations for the area of ​​the Ruhrsiedlungsverband and the administrative district of Düsseldorf .

In addition to his job, Hohmann turned to questions of celestial mechanics and space travel . Between 1911 and 1915 he calculated what properties a rocket-propelled spaceship must have in order to get to other planets with the least amount of energy . In addition to the problem of reaching the escape speeds, he also examined the re-entry into the earth's atmosphere . In 1925 he published his work in the work The Accessibility of Heavenly Bodies , including the Hohmann orbit , which describes an energetically favorable transition between two orbits around a dominant celestial body. Some of the ideas presented in this work were later incorporated into the Apollo program for the manned moon landing . It was translated into English and into Russian in 1938. Hohmann maintained contacts with the physicist Hermann Oberth and the astronomer Max Valier , among others . From 1927 he was a board member of the Association for Space Travel in Wroclaw.

Hohmann died on March 11, 1945, completely exhausted from constant air raids and bombing raids in an Essen hospital. He was given an honorary grave by the city of Essen at the Bredeney cemetery .

Aftermath

Memorial stone and plaque at the Walter Hohmann observatory
Ariane 5 rocket on the Walter-Hohmann-Höhe in Hardheim

Hohmann's work The Accessibility of the Celestial Bodies (1925) is considered to be the first mathematically founded explanation of the elementary fundamentals of space technology .

In memory of the space pioneer, a street in Essen's Südstadt and the Walter Hohmann Observatory in Essen are named after him. It is a public observatory in the Schuir district run by a non-profit association and is also involved in researching asteroids. The observatory was founded by a small group of people interested in astronomy in 1969. Since 1971 it has been called Walter-Hohmann-Sternwarte Essen eV

In his place of birth there is the astronomy working group Walter-Hohmann-Sternwarte, the Walter-Hohmann-Schulzentrum and the Walter-Hohmann-Höhe, on which the Walter Hohmann monument with a model of the Ariane 5 rocket on a scale of 1 : 4 was set up. As early as 1970, a crater near the rim on the back of the moon received its name in honor of the outstanding scientific achievements.

Publications

  • The accessibility of the heavenly bodies . Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 1925
  • Travel routes, travel times, landing possibilities , in Willy Ley (Ed.): The possibilities of space travel , Hachmeister and Thal, Leipzig 1928
  • The accessibility of the heavenly bodies. Inquiry into the space problem. 3. Edition. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1994. Supplemented reprint of the original edition from 1925. ISBN 3-486-23106-5 .

literature

Web links

Commons : Walter Hohmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ↑ H. Wittbrod, H. Mielke, G. Narimow, J. Saizew: Space and Earth Volume 3: Planetary research with space probes , transpress VEB Verlag für Verkehrwesen , Berlin 1982, p. 186
  2. ↑ Inquiry to Walter-Hohmann-Sternwarte Essen e. V .: The Russian cosmonaut Georgi Grechko proved that this work was translated into Russian as early as 1938. Online at www.sternwarte-essen.de
  3. ↑ Honorary graves of the city of Essen. (PDF; 230 kB) Historical Association for the City and Abbey of Essen e. V., accessed on August 2, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Rocket in honor of Walter Hohmann
personal data
SURNAME Hohmann, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Test engineer for structural engineering, is considered a space pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Hardheim , Germany
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 1945
Place of death Essen , Germany