The Last Artifact from the Society for Space Travel

Some artifacts at the National Air and Space Museum are part of comprehensive object groups. The Museum’s collection tells the story of Robert Goddard, for instance, through some 80 artifacts that stretch from his early experiments in the 1910s to his large, complex liquid-fuel rockets of the 1930s, and to his evocative personal items.

Not all objects, however, arrive at the Museum as part of a large collection. Indeed some, like one small rocket engine nozzle currently on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, are the only known remaining artifacts representing a particular technology or innovator.

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This engine nozzle is likely the last remaining object from the Society for Space Travel (VfR, Verein für Raumschiffahrt). Fabricated in 1931 or 1932, it is made of aluminum alloy and is approximately 2 inches (5 cm) long. After its creation, the Society found the nozzle to be defective, meaning that it was never used in a test fire or launch.

Although a small artifact, this nozzle speaks to a much wider story. In the 1920s and 1930s, experimenters across the United States and Europe began working on rocket technologies. The list of early rocketeers includes Goddard (who launched the first liquid-fuel rocket in Massachusetts in 1926), the American Rocket Society, Frank Malina and other researchers at Cal Tech, and the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD) in the Soviet Union.

The VfR was founded in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław, Poland) in 1927 and boasted several influential members. These included rocketry proponent Max Valier, rocket engineer Johannes Winkler, and popular science writer Willy Ley.

Like other rocket societies at the time, the VfR worked on developing its own liquid-fuel rocket. In 1930, its members created their first rocket, the Mirak (short for the German “minimum rocket”). By spring 1931, the group was testing a new configuration, the Two-Stick Repulsor. Its “two sticks” were the rocket’s two external tanks (one for gasoline fuel and one for the nitrogen that pushed the oxidizer into the combustion chamber). Its “Repulsor” name came from Ley’s desire to avoid the term “rocket,” which was at the time most associated with simple powder rockets, as opposed to the VfR’s more complicated liquid-fuel devices. Ley chose Repulsor in honor of the Martian spacecraft from German sci-fi author Kurd Lasswitz’s influential 1897 novel Two Planets (Auf zwei Planeten, lit. On Two Planets).

The Two Stick rockets achieved success, reaching an altitude of 0.9 miles (1.5 km). In August 1931, the VfR tested its new One-Stick Repulsor (also called Repulsor IV). This simplified rocket had its tanks in parallel down the center of the rocket. The group worked on the Repulsor IV for a year and a half.

Despite these early successes, the VfR ultimately proved to be short-lived, dissolving across late 1933 and 1934 in reaction to rocketry experiments moving from the purview of amateur groups to the German Army following the National Socialist Party takeover. In the years that followed, the VfR’s technical artifacts were either lost or destroyed.

The Museum’s Repulsor IV nozzle, however, was not lost. Instead, one of the Society’s members, Herbert Schaefer, brought it with him to the United States when he emigrated from Germany in 1935. Schaefer had studied mechanical engineering in Germany and continued to have a successful engineering career in the United States. After his arrival, he worked at the Kollsman Instrument Corporation, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer of aircraft altimeters. Starting in 1959, Schaefer moved to working as an aerospace engineer at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), a NASA predecessor, in Huntsville, Alabama. After ABMA became part of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Schaefer worked on various space programs, including the unrealized Mobile Lunar Laboratory (MOLAB), a roving lab that would have permitted astronauts to work remotely from a lunar base, gathering geological samples for up to two weeks at a time. In the 1970s, he worked at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. While working on these various NASA programs, Schaefer kept the VfR rocket nozzle in his possession for some forty years. In 1978, Schaefer donated it to the Museum.

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Today, this only known surviving artifact from the VfR speaks to much wider stories. First, the nozzle speaks to the particularities of how the Museum collects rocketry artifacts. Most rockets are expendable, meaning that what is available to collect has most often been artifacts left over from experimentations, not components used for launches themselves. Second, this object is a reminder of the many experimenters who worked on rocketry across two continents in the interwar years. Finally, the Repulsor rockets are excellent examples of the close connection between imaginations and technical developments. As is evidenced by many artifacts across the Museum’s collection, revolutionary innovators especially have been inspired by sci-fi dreams, and their designs have then in turn pushed the bounds of imagination for what might be possible.