1. Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist.
13 Facts About Robert Esnault-Pelterie
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie is referred to as being one of the founders of modern rocketry and astronautics, along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Germans Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun and the American Robert H Goddard.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie was born on 8 November 1881 in Paris to a textile industrialist.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie was educated at the Faculte des Sciences, studying engineering at the Sorbonne.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie served in World War I and was made an Officier de la Legion d'Honneur.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie died on 6 December 1957 in Nice, France.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie's glider was based upon an incomplete understanding of the Wright glider, and although using a version of the wing-warping which the Wright brothers had used to control their aircraft this did not work properly and was abandoned, since he considered it dangerous.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie's family had invested heavily to fund his aircraft designs, and this had left them nearly financially ruined.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie became interested in space travel, and, not knowing of Tsiolkovsky's 1903 work, in 1913 produced a paper that presented the rocket equation and calculated the energies required to reach the Moon and nearby planets.
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On 8 June 1927 Robert Esnault-Pelterie gave a symposium for the Societe astronomique de France titled L'exploration par fusees de la tres haute atmosphere et la possibilite des voyages interplanetaires, concerning the exploration of outer space using rocket propulsion.
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In 1929 Robert Esnault-Pelterie proposed the idea of the ballistic missile for military bombardment.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie was the inventor of the "center stick" aircraft control and of a new type of fuel pump.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie developed the idea of rocket maneuver by means of vectored thrust.