TimeOut

Surprisingly enough one of the early ones, who - apparently - contributed quite a bit to that body of knowledge and as Herman Potocnik Noordung from Slovenia. 

Some years ago a museum celebrating his work specifically and space travel more generally was opened close to the ski resort of Rogla in Slovenia (a good hour’s drive from the capital Ljubljana).

I had the opportunity to visit it some time ago but seem to have forgotten all about it - small children in the household don’t aid short term memory 😂

Here a couple of pictures:

Getting to Potocnik eventually…

Including his seminal piece of work, ‘The Problem of Space Travel’…

They even had the first translation into Russian from 1935 on display. There seems to have been interest from the Soviet Union as well, even though the influence was heavier on the German space research - Potocnik was a contemporary of Wernher Von Braun’s professors - i.e. the latter influence on the US space program came primarily via that route. 

Other contemporaries are covered quite extensively, too. 

One of those professors of von Braun 😊

And then the other side…

They also have lots of exhibits of his ideas of habitation in space. Including using a centrifugal force for limited gravity generation. 

And models of space stations…

Here an original drawing of a geostationary space station…

Outside there are some statues of a handful of people instrumental in space theory development…

From what I understood, the statues have been donated, so there will probably be more to come over the years. 

The museum is not large but without cranky children you can easily spend two or so hours inside and there is probably quite some new stuff that you might not have been aware of, so I can definitely recommend the detour to go visit. 

  login to reply