Guido von Pirquet

Guido von Pirquet (30 March 1880 – 17 April 1966) was an Austrian pioneer of astronautics and a Baron of a lower noble family.

[1] In 1928, he proposed the idea of building a space station in low Earth orbit (LEO) for fueling vehicles to travel to the other planets.

[1] Guido von Pirquet is one of several scientists working in the pre-spaceflight era (1920-1957) who fully understood the promise of the gravity assist method for reducing flight time and increasing payload to the outer planets.

He gave detailed formulas showing how close passage of Jupiter could be used to make a large change in the velocity and orbital energy of a spacecraft.

Minovitch claims incorrectly that he is the "inventor" of the gravity assist space flight technique.. Pirquet crater on the Moon is named after him.