Walter Hohmann

Walter Hohmann (18 March 1880 – 11 March 1945) was a German engineer who made an important contribution to the understanding of orbital dynamics. In a book published in 1925, Hohmann demonstrated a fuel-efficient path to move a spacecraft between two different orbits, now called a Hohmann transfer orbit. He received his Ph.D. from the RWTH Aachen University in 1920.
Biography
Hohmann was born in Hardheim, the son of a doctor. As a boy, he lived with his family in Port Elizabeth, South Africa for a time, before returning to Germany. He studied civil engineering at the Technical University of Munich, graduating in 1904. He then worked for the municipal councils of Vienna, Hanover and Breslau (now Wrocław) before settling in Essen, where he eventually held the post of chief architect.
Hohmann became interested in space as a young boy when his father would show him the southern constellations. As soon as he read the science fiction works of French author Jules Verne and German author Kurd Lasswitz, he started to wonder, "How do you get up there?" Between 1911 and 1912, while Hohmann was working as an engineer in Breslau, his older cousin sent him some astronomy textbooks. Hohmann soon began to fill up most of his free time with the study of astronomy, and started seriously considering the problem of interplanetary spaceflight.
Eventually, Hohmann realized that minimizing the amount of fuel that the spacecraft had to carry would be an important consideration, and he plotted a variety of orbits until he found the one that now bears his name. He published his findings in Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (The Attainability of the Celestial Bodies).
The importance of this work saw Hohmann become a leading figure in Germany's amateur rocketry movement in the late 1920s, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR — "Spaceflight Society"). Writer Willy Ley asked Hohmann to contribute to an anthology of papers on spaceflight, "Die Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt" (The Possibility of Space Travel), published in 1928. Hohmann contributed a post about "Fahrtrouten, Fahrzeiten und Landungsmöglichkeiten" (Routes, Timetables, and Landing Options) where he proposed using a separable landing module to travel to the Moon, an idea that was later utilized in the Apollo lunar missions.
Following the rise to power of the Nazi party, Hohmann distanced himself as much as possible from rocketry, wishing to play no part in the development of the rocket as a weapon. He died in an Essen hospital shortly before the end of World War II as a result of stress experienced during the intense Allied bombing of the city.
Walter-Hohmann-Observatory
In 2009, the Walter-Hohmann-Observatory in Essen, Germany installed a Commemorative plaque at their ground:
Also asteroid 9661 Hohmann is named after him.
References
Hohmann, Walter, The Attainability of Heavenly Bodies (Washington: NASA Technical Translation F-44, 1960).
McLaughlin, William I. (2000), "Walter Hohmann’s Roads In Space" Journal of Space Mission Architecture, Issue 2: pp. 1–14.
External links
Homepage of the Walter-Hohmann-Observatory (German – Contact in English possible)
1880 births
1945 deaths
German aerospace engineers
German civil engineers
German spaceflight pioneers
19th-century German architects
RWTH Aachen University alumni
Technical University of Munich alumni
People from Neckar-Odenwald-Kreis
Engineers from North Rhine-Westphalia
20th-century German architects