In the 1920s and 1930s, the German
Society for Space Travel (
Verein für Raumschiffahrt, referred to as
VfR by its founders) began to gain in popularity, with membership growing from outside of
Germany as well as within. The primary cause for the ''VfR's
gaining worldwide appeal was due to the writings of mathematician Hermann Oberth who detailed, in a 1923 publication entitled The Rocket into Interplanetary Space'', the
mechanics of placing a satellite into
Earth orbit.
Herman Potočnik was the first to publish the concept of placing a
geosynchronous satellite in
geostationary orbit, in 1928.
Arthur C. Clarke popularized this concept even further in 1945, in a paper entitled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?", published in
Wireless World magazine. Clarke described the concept as useful for
communications satellites. In 1954,
Wernher von Braun proposed the idea of placing a
satellite into orbit at a meeting of Spaceflight committee of the
American Rocket Society. On 26 January 1956 at the Symposium on "The Scientific Uses of Earth Satellites" at the
University of Michigan, sponsored by the
Upper Atmosphere Research Panel,
James Van Allen proposed the use of U.S. satellites for cosmic-ray investigations.
Ernst Stuhlinger, from von Braun's team noted this presentation and stayed in contact with Van Allen's Iowa Group. Through "preparedness and good fortune", van Allen later wrote, the experiment was selected as the principal payload (
Explorer 1) for the first flight of a four-stage
Juno I rocket on 1 February 1958 (
GMT). == References ==