Oh, and he has a moon crater named after him too. If that wasn’t enough, Sternfeld’s calculations had an error margin smaller than one percent. Архив Ари Штернфельда/CC BY 3.0īorn in the town of Sieradz, on May 14th, 1905, Sternfeld was the author of the theory behind the flights of multistage rockets (those that require several detachable components to launch), devised the principles that allowed them to break through the atmosphere, calculated the trajectories of interplanetary flights and optimized them due to fuel consumption, engine thrust, capacity, overload and other parameters.Īnd all this he did before a single satellite had been launched into space.
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You may never have heard of him, but Ary Abramovich Sternfeld is considered the father of modern aerospace engineering and is also credited with introducing the word cosmonaut to our vocabulary.Īfter studying philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków he moved to France and enrolled in the École nationale supérieure d'électricité et de mécanique L’ENSEM in Nancy to study engineering. This week sees the 21st annual World Space Week, an event described by the organisers as "an international celebration of science and technology, and their contribution to the betterment of the human condition.”īut, if it weren’t for a Polish engineer born in a small town northwest of Łódź, there might have been no annual celebration - ever. Ary Abramovich Sternfeld is considered the father of modern aerospace engineering and is also credited with introducing the word cosmonaut to our vocabulary.