Max Valier

Max Valier was an Austrian rocketry pioneer, born in Bolzano, who became a leading figure in early European rocket development and a co-founder of Germany's Verein fur Raumschiffahrt spaceflight society, bringing together many of the era's most active rocket experimenters. He played a central role in the Opel-RAK program, widely regarded as the world's first large-scale organized rocket vehicle initiative, which built a series of rocket-propelled cars, sleds and gliders through the late 1920s, and on April 19, 1930, Valier carried out the first test drive of a rocket car powered by a liquid propellant engine rather than solid-fuel charges. He also wrote influential popular science books that explained rocket propulsion and the prospect of spaceflight to a general audience well before the subject entered wider public awareness. Valier died on May 17, 1930, in Berlin, when an alcohol-fueled rocket engine he was testing exploded, becoming one of the first people killed while developing the technology he had championed.