Victor Coissac: A Forgotten Astronautical Pioneer And Contemporary of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert H. Goddard, And Robert Esnault-Pelterie

摘要

The science of astronautics was born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Four great pioneers would lay the theoretical foundations: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia, Robert H. Goddard of the United States, Hermann Oberth who was of German heritage, and Robert Esnault-Pelterie of France. During the second half of the century, their theories would be put into practice, leading to the conquest of space. Other scientists and engineers of the period, although less well known, also sought to contribute to our knowledge of astronautics, for example Fridrikh Tsander and Yuri Kondratyuk in Russia. Another one of the earlier investigators is perhaps worthy of attention and is almost totally absent in the literature. This is Victor Coissac, a Frenchman who began his writings on space travel as early as 1915 with the first, privately published version of his La Conquete de l'Espace. followed by a 1916 edition appearing as two different books bound in one volume. The first is L'evolution des mondes (The Evolution of Worlds) while the second is La Conquete (hereafter cited as The Conquest of Space.) This was about the same period that Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and Esnault-Pelterie were actively working out their theories, and almost a decade before Oberth's classic book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenraeumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space) was published in 1923, though Oberth had begun to lay out his theories at about the time Coissac's work first appeared.