Gaetano Arturo Crocco

Gaetano Arturo Crocco (26 October 1877 – 19 January 1968) was an Italian scientist and aeronautics pioneer, the founder of the Italian Rocket Society, and went on to become Italy's leading space scientist. He was born in Naples.

In 1927, Crocco begun working with solid-propellant rockets and, in 1929, designed and built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in Italy. He began work with monopropellants (fuel and oxidizer combined in one chemical liquid) in 1932, making him one of the first researchers in this field.

As head of the School of Aeronautics of the University of Rome, he performed research on flight mechanics, structural design, and high-altitude flight in addition to his work in rocket propulsion.

Because of his early efforts in aeronautics, Italian satellites were launched starting in the 1960s. The San Marco programme was a cooperative effort of NASA and the Italian Space Commission, with NASA providing launch vehicles, use of its facilities, and training of Italian personnel.

G.A. Crocco is a pioner both in aeronautics and astronautics. In 1898 he was serving in the Italian Army Engineers Corps in the Wireless Dept. when he met Captain Maurizio Moris. Moris, heading a Specialists Brigade, was deeply interested in the new field of aeronautics: he took Crocco in his staff starting a lifelong cooperation. At the time the Specialists Brigade was testing anchored balloons on the Bracciano Lake, north of Rome. Since 1904 Crocco started experimenting with airships. In 1906, together with Ottavio Ricaldoni he developed Airship 1 featuring a revolutionary semi-rigid flexible structure. On October 31, 1908, piloting an improved version of the airship, the N1, supplied with a rudder and direction indicators, Crocco flew from Vigna di Valle to Rome and back, covering 50 miles in one hour and a half. N1 was the first airship ever to fly over Rome at an attitude of 500 mt (1500 ft). In 1912 Crocco and Rinaldoni tested an hydroplane on the Bracciano lake while experimenting with airships together with other researchers (one of them, Umberto Nobile, would become eventually a famous polar explorer). In the meantime Crocco kept studying propellers’ shapes and sections and in 1914 drew plans for a closed-circuit wind tunnel to be built in Rome. In 1923 Crocco started studying space flight, jet propulsion and rocket fuels. In 1927 the Aeronautic Experimental Institute where Crocco was working, obtained a 200,000 ItL financing (equivalent to today’s 1million Euro) to develop black-powder-fuelled rockets to be tested later in a BPD firing range at Segni, east of Rome. He moved onto research on liquid fuels, drawing plans for the first Italian-built combustion chamber, tested in 1930 with the help of his son, Luigi Crocco. The outbreak of WWii and lack of financing confined Crocco to academic activities: he directed the Aeronautic Engineering School from 1935 to 1942 and then again from 1948 to 1952, when Luigi Broglio succeeded him in the post. In those years Crocco wrote hundreds of papers and patented so many inventions that his students used to say in mock poetry "Everything I use or see, Oh my Crocco is made by thee."

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