G.A. Crocco was a pioneer in aeronautics and astronautics. In 1898 he was serving in the Italian Army Engineers Corps in the Wireless Dept. when he met Captain
Maurizio Moris. Moris, heading a Specialists Brigade, was deeply interested in the new field of aeronautics: he took Crocco in his staff starting a lifelong cooperation. At the time the Specialists Brigade was testing anchored balloons on
Lake Bracciano north of Rome. In 1904 Crocco started experimenting with airships. In 1906, together with Ottavio Ricaldoni he developed Airship 1 featuring a revolutionary semi-rigid flexible structure. On 31 October 1908, piloting an improved version of the airship, the N1, with a rudder and direction indicators, Crocco flew from Vigna di Valle to Rome and back, covering 50 miles in one hour and a half. N1 was the first airship ever to fly over Rome at an altitude of 500 mt (1500 ft). In 1912 Crocco and Rinaldoni tested a hydroplane on the Bracciano lake while experimenting with airships together with other researchers (one of them,
Umberto Nobile, would become eventually a famous polar explorer). In the meantime Crocco kept studying propellers' shapes and sections and in 1914 drew plans for a closed-circuit
wind tunnel to be built in Rome. In 1923 Crocco started studying space flight, jet propulsion and rocket fuels. In 1927 the Aeronautic Experimental Institute where Crocco was working, obtained a 200,000 ItL financing (equivalent to today's 1 million Euro) to develop
black powder rocket motors to be tested later in a BPD firing range at Segni, east of Rome. He moved on to research on liquid fuels, drawing plans for the first Italian-built combustion chamber, tested in 1930 with the help of his son, Luigi Crocco. The outbreak of
World War II and lack of financing confined Crocco to academic activities: he directed the Aeronautic Engineering School from 1935 to 1942 and then again from 1948 to 1952, when
Luigi Broglio succeeded him in the post. In those years Crocco wrote hundreds of papers and patented so many inventions that his students used to say in mock poetry "Everything I use or see, Oh my Crocco is made by thee." After WW II Crocco went back to his old passions, missiles and astronautics, creating in 1950 an informative course on superior ballistics within the Aeronautic Engineering School. In the inaugural speech he spoke extensively on man-made satellites and rocket trajectories. In 1951 he founded the Italian Rocket Association (AIR) to rally all the fans of the new astronautic science. In 1951, a full decade before the
Gagarin space flight, he held a meeting on the problems of a crewed spaceship re-entry in the atmosphere. Later on he devised a
parallel-stage rocket, a method more rarely applied than tandem stages. Crocco was inducted as a member of the inaugural class to the
International Space Hall of Fame. He can be considered the first to calculate a mission trajectory considering multiple gravity-assists. == The 'Crocco Mission' or 'Crocco Grand Tour' ==