Herman Potočnik (pseudonym Hermann Noordung; 22 December 1892 – 27 August 1929) was an Austro-Hungarian Army officer, electrical engineer and astronautics theorist.

The meaning of his German-like pseudonym Noordung is still a mystery, but some suggest that he used it to indicate the problems of chaos (German: Ordnung, "order"; ordunga in Slovene colloquial language).

From 1910 to 1913 he studied at the Imperial and Royal Technical Military Academy in Mödling in Lower Austria (Niederösterreich) near Vienna and graduated as an engineer second lieutenant.

[citation needed] He described the use of orbiting spacecraft for detailed observation of the ground for peaceful and military purposes, and described how the special conditions of space could be useful for scientific experiments.

The book was translated into Russian during early 1935, Slovene in 1986 (by the Slovenska matica), English in 1995 (by NASA) and Croatian in 2004 (by Marino Fonović, published by Labin Art Press).

A partial translation to English, containing most of the essential chapters, was made as early as 1929 for the American magazine Science Wonder Stories and was issued in three parts (July, August and September 1929) and credited to "Captain Hermann Noordung, A.D., M.E., Berlin.

His concepts were first considered seriously only by amateur rocketeers in Germany, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR - "Spaceflight Society"), the most notable of whom was Hermann Oberth.

In 1955 and 1968, George Pal's and Byron Haskin's Conquest of Space (based on Wernher von Braun's published concepts: first, several articles in Collier's magazine 1952– 54, co-written with Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell, and later developed into books from Viking Press.

An obituary notice about his death was printed in one Maribor daily newspaper, mentioning his ranks (engineers and captain), his illness, but nothing about his work regarding space.