Out There: 7 Poles Who Advanced Space Travel
Did you know that the concept of the multistage rocket, crucial to space travel, was originally devised by a Polish citizen? Or that Poles played an important role in the Apollo Program which put the first man on the Moon? Discover some important – and often unknown – Polish contributions to space travel! 3, 2, 1… Blast off!
A drawing showing a three stage rocket from the book ‘The Great Art of Artillery of Casimir Siemienowicz’, photo: from the article ‘Kazimierz Siemienowicz i Jego Wkład do Nauki o Rakietach’ by Mieczysław Subotowicz When you think about people who made contributions to space travel, someone living in the 17th century would probably not come to mind… But, funnily enough, Kazimierz Siemienowicz, who was born in ca. 1600 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is credited with inventing an engineering solution that ended up being crucial for sending rockets into space.
Siemienowicz was born near Rosienie, a town in today’s Lithuania. He received a thorough education and became an artillery specialist in the army of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1650, he published a book entitled The Great Art of Artillery of Casimir Siemienowicz, Formerly Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance to the King of Poland. Using his knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, mechanics, pneumatics and more, Siemienowicz fashioned his book into a comprehensive monograph on artillery. His book was treated as an important source for almost two centuries.
One of the books’ five sections is devoted to rockets, and it is here that the author described what is called a multistage rocket. Such rockets, in layman’s terms, consist of two or more rockets stacked on top of each other. After launching, when the first rocket runs out of its propellant, it falls off reducing the mass of the remaining device thus making it more efficient. Further parts of the device, or stages, are designed to fall off in the correct sequence.
Multistage rockets are used today when launching objects into space, their construction allows them to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. As of yet, a single stage device that could reach Earth’s orbit hasn’t been constructed. The rocket used in 1957 to deploy the first ever artificial Earth satellite, the Soviet-made Sputnik 1, was a multistage rocket.
Interestingly, Siemienowicz was the first person to have proposed the concept:
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The idea of the multistage rocket was invented by Kazimierz Siemienowicz. A drawing of his included [in The Great Art of Artillery] shows the first, historical version of a multistage rocket. The drawing shows a three stage device. Each of the stages constitutes a separate rocket equipped with fuel, a nozzle and fuse. The entire object is composed of three combined pipes.
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From ‘Kazimierz Siemienowicz i Jego Wład do Nauki o Rakietach’, a 1957 article by Mieczysław Subotowicz, trans. MK
In his book, Siemionowicz also suggests that the flight of a rocket ought to be stabilised by delta shaped wings. This idea was revolutionary as in the 17th century rockets were typically stabilised by lengthy tails. Wings only came into widespread use as rocket stabilisers in the 20th century. Today, Poland, Lithuania and Belarus consider him an important historical figure.
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Ary Sternfeld in the 1960s, photo: Sławek Biegański / Forum
Another Pole who was interested in multistage rockets was Ary Sternfeld (1905-1980). This Polish Jewish engineer and theoretician of astronautics was born in the town of Sieradz and studied astronomy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the 1920s, Sternfeld moved to Nancy, France, where he obtained his diploma in engineering.
In 1932, he returned to Poland, to the city of Łódź, where he authored his noted book Initiation à la Cosmonautique (Introduction to Cosmonautics). Introduction to Cosmonautics is considered a milestone in the aerodynamics of space flight – Sternfeld wrote about topics such as rocket technology, interplanetary spacecraft and weightlessness.
The book in question also contained Sternfeld’s theory of multistage rocket flight and… 66 possible Earth satellite trajectories calculated by the author. One of these trajectories was actually consistent with the orbit Sputnik 1 was placed on 24 years after the book was written!
At the time when Sputnik 1 was being launched, Sternfeld was already living in the USSR, where he moved in 1935. There, he helped develop the Soviet Union’s renowned space programme. Naturally, he was very happy to learn that his orbit was part of a breakthrough moment in space exploration. Here’s how he commented on the day Sputnik 1 began to circle around planet Earth:
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That was one of the best days in my life. Isn’t it the greatest joy, the greatest happiness for a man when he witnesses the realisation of ideas that had consumed him from his earliest days and which he propagated his entire life?
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From ‘Dzieje Mojej Pierwszej Książki’ by Ary Sternfeld, 1976, trans. MK
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Left to right, Schmitt, Evans and Cernan are photographed with a Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) trainer during the rollout of the Apollo 17 rocket, photo: East News
Mieczysław Bekker was born in 1905, like Sternfeld (clearly a good year for space travel!), in the Polish village of Strzyżów. In 1929, he completed the Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology (Politechnika Warszawska). A few years later, he became a lecturer at the same institution, devising and giving lectures on the movement of tracked vehicles on uneven ground. Thirty years later, his accomplishments in this field led to the establishment of a new branch of mechanics known as terramechanics.
Bekker fought in the Polish Army during World War II and, after Poland’s defeat, he made his way to France, and later Canada. In 1956, he moved to the United States, where he lectured on mechanics and land locomotion at the likes of MIT or the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1961, he became the director of the General Motors Research Institute in Santa Barbara. That year, NASA announced a competition for a vehicle that could be used on the moon by astronauts in the Apollo Space Program. Bekker took part in this competition and his design – known as the Lunar Roving Vehicle or LRV – won. Eventually, three units of this vehicle were sent to the moon during the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions!
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Professor Bekker’s knowledge of adapting wheels to various terrain types was key to building a machine appropriate for lunar conditions. And the LRV’s wheels were the engineers’ most difficult problem. Classic tyres would not work right on a surface covered with moon dust. […] Therefore, Bekker decided to build the wheels using a material (used to manufacture grand piano strings) woven in a mesh with attached titan strips.
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From ‘The Polish Man Who Sent a Car to the Moon’ at pw.edu.pl
Bekker’s electric vehicle had a range of up to one hundred kilometres and could carry up to 500 kilos of cargo (taking into consideration the Moon’s gravity). It could fold in half and had room for two astronauts. Overall, the three LRVs used in the Apollo Program smoothly covered a distance of over 200 kilometres, reaching a top speed of 18 km/h. Their use greatly expanded the research capacities of the Apollo missions they were part of. In recognition of Bekker’s contributions to space travel, his name is part of the Space Walk of Fame Museum in Titusville, Florida. He passed away in 1989 in Santa Barbara.
Eugeniusz Lachocki, photo: public domain Another Pole that played an important role in the Apollo Program was Eugeniusz Lachocki (1921-2010). He was born in the Polish town of Prużana (today’s Belarus), which was captured by the Soviet Union in World War II. Lachocki and his family were deported to Kazakhstan, where he was put to work at a state-owned farm. Fortunately, in 1941, Lachocki, his father and brothers were allowed to join Anders’ Army, a Polish force created in the USSR. As a soldier of Anders’ Army, Lachocki left the Soviet Union and fought in the Middle East and in the famed Battle of Monte Cassino.
After the war, Lachocki studied at an electronic technical school in Ferno, Italy. Later he moved to England where he obtained a university diploma in electronic engineering. In 1952, he moved to the USA where lived for the rest of his life. There, he worked at General Instruments and later at the Radio Corporation of America.
His engineering skills were much appreciated at the RCA and so he was assigned to a team working for the Apollo Program. Lachocki was tasked with constructing the power supplies for the radio communication and TV equipment of the lunar expeditions. His devices were present in the Apollo 11 lunar module used for the first crewed landing on the Moon in 1969!
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That was just the beginning of the career of Lachocki’s power supplies – all the subsequent Apollo missions relied on them. When the Apollo Program decided it was time for a ‘lunar car’ or a Lunar Roving Vehicle, whose main constructor was Mieczysław Bekker, the task of designing the power supplies for it was given, of course, to Lachocki. […] His power supplies installed in the LRVs worked absolutely flawlessly.
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From ‘Kosmiczne Zasilacze Polaka’, a 2019 article at niedziela.pl, trans. MK
After the Apollo Program came to an end, Lachocki successfully worked on power supplies for the electronic devices on board space shuttles. For his achievements in the field of space travel he was inducted into the Space Walk of Fame.
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Launching Saturn V rockets, photo: Wikipedia
Another Space-Walk-of-Famer, Wojciech Rostafiński was born in 1921 in Warsaw and completed his high school education in 1939. During World War II, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union occupied Poland, he became a soldier of the underground resistance. Rostafiński fought in the Warsaw Uprising and was awarded the Order of Virtuti Militari for his bravery. He was eventually imprisoned by the Nazis but managed to survive the war.
After World War II, he moved to Belgium, where he obtained a diploma in engineering at the Louvain School of Engineering. He relocated to the USA in 1953 and, eight years later, became an employee of NASA in Cleveland. He worked for the agency for a whopping 33 years, dealing primarily with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen pumps, as well as axial compressors used in rocket engines. Among many other accomplishments, he contributed to the design of the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo Program missions in the years 1967-1972.
Rostafiński was also a committed promotor of science, one that gave numerous lectures at schools and authored plenty of articles about space exploration. In 1971, he received a doctorate in applied mathematics from Columbia University. Rostafiński passed away in 2002 in Cleveland.
It’s worth adding that three other Poles also made noteworthy contributions to the Apollo Program. Werner Ryszard Kirchner devised a special kind of fuel for the Eagle lunar module which Neil Armstrong used to land on the Moon. Stanisław Stankiewicz conducted research on the air composition appropriate for the interiors of the crewed modules of the programme’s spacecraft. Kazimierz Piwoński designed the rendezvous radar used for the docking of the lunar module returning from the Moon’s surface with the command module remaining in orbit around the Moon.
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Soyuz 30 crew: Pyotr Klimuk and Mirosław Hermaszewski during training in 1978, photo: SovFoto / Universal Images Group / East News
Next up we have the first and, as of today, the only Pole to travel into space! Mirosław Hermaszewski was born in 1941 in the village of Lipniki in the eastern parts of Interwar Poland. Tragically, during the Volhynian Massacre, his father and 18 other members of his family were killed. After World War II, Hermaszewski and his remaining family, like many other families, were relocated to the town of Wołów near Wrocław.
In 1961, Hermaszewski was admitted to the Military University of Aviation in Dęblin where he learned to pilot fighter jets, including supersonic jets. He went on to become one of the best pilots in the Polish Air Force and, by 1976, had achieved the rank of major. That year, he was chosen to participate in the Soviet space programme Interkosmos which, among other things, sent Eastern Bloc citizens from outside the USSR into space. Hermaszewski was to become an astronaut!
In December 1976, he travelled to the Space City training facility near Moscow, where he prepared for his space flight. For a year and a half he worked on his fitness, learned about spacecrafts and orbital navigation, operated space flight simulators, and more. His ability to cope with stress and to think clearly under pressure were among the psychological predispositions that made him perfect for space travel.
Finally, on 27th June 1978, Hermaszewski blasted off into space on board of a Soyuz 7K-T spacecraft, alongside Soviet astronaut Pyotr Klimuk. The craft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and after two days docked with the Salyut 6 space station – two other Soviet astronauts were already waiting for them there. Hermaszewski and Klimuk spent eight days on the station, circling around the Earth and conducting medical and geophysical research. After their time was up, they made it back to Earth safely, landing in a corn field in Kazakhstan.
In a 2018 interview published by the Rzeczpospolita newspaper, Hermaszewski recalled some of the most memorable things he experienced while in space:
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The sunrise was not only an aesthetic experience but also a spiritual one. It’s like the birth of something new. The sun is hiding near the horizon, you can see the curvature of the Earth and the changing colours: red shifting into amaranth, blue, dark blue and then it stops – merging with the black of space. A very special moment for me was when I saw Poland in its entirety in one gaze. I actually shouted to my friends: look it’s my Poland.
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From ‘Mirosław Hermaszewski o Pierwszym Polaku w Kosmosie’, trans. MK
After his space flight, Hermaszewski (who never returned to space) went on to become a general in the Polish Army. In 2005, he made his farewell flight as a Polish military pilot; today he’s retired.
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Artur B. Chmielewski holding a model of the 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko comet, the destination of the Rosetta probe, photo: NASA
Artur Bartłomiej Chmielewski is still active in field of space exploration in Poland today. Born in 1957 in Warsaw, he happens to be the son of the celebrated cartoonist Henryk ‘Papcio’ Chmielewski – the author of the immensely popular comic book series Tytus, Romek i A’Tomek. Apparently, Chmielewski Sr. hoped his son would become an artist or writer but Chmielewski Jr. preferred physics and math.
After completing his high school education in Poland, Chmielewski moved to the United States, where he obtained diplomas in mechanical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. In the 1980s, he worked at the Ford Motor Company and the experience he gained there enabled him to land a job with NASA’s famed Jet Propulsion Lab, where he initially worked on the construction of an electric car. Later he moved on to space projects, which he had always hoped to work on. Since then, he has built space instruments, developed interplanetary spacecraft, and acted as a manager in charge of space missions. In this year’s interview for rmf24.pl, Chmielewski talked about some of the most important projects he’s worked on:
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I had the opportunity to take part in such missions as Ulysses, which studies the Sun. […] There was the Galileo mission to Jupiter, which included a probe constructed by ESA. […] There was the Cassini probe which flew to Saturn and whose findings made it possible for me to participate in the planning of the next mission. That was the mission to Titan, because Cassini had discovered that there are some lakes and possibly underground waters there. […] Later I also worked on the Rosetta mission which landed on a comet.
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From ‘Artur B. Chmielewski, Syn Papcia Chmiela, dla RMF FM o Horrorze Lądowania na Marsie’, trans. MK
However, Chmielewski says that he’s most excited about the projects he’s yet to work on. Among them is a mission tasked with bringing Martian samples collected by the Perseverance rover back to Earth.
Well, it looks like our list of cosmic Poles has come to an end. Next time you look up at a starry sky or here about an amazing space feat, think about the Poles that got us there!
Written by Marek Kępa, Apr 21
