Luigi Broglio (11 November 1911 – 14 January 2001), was an Italian aerospace engineer, airforce lieutenant colonel and dean of the school of aeronautical engineering at the

University of Rome La Sapienza The Sapienza University of Rome (), formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", abbreviated simply as Sapienza ('Wisdom'), is a Public university, public research university located in Rome, Italy. It was founded in 1303 and is ...

. Known as "the Italian von Braun", he is best known as the architect of the

San Marco programme The San Marco programme was an Italian satellite launch programme conducted between the early 1960s and the late 1980s. The project resulted in the launch of the first Italian-built satellite, San Marco 1, on 15 December 1964. With the program ...

. The facility he conceived, originally the '' San Marco Equatorial Range'', is now named in his honour as well as the asteroid 18542 Broglio.

Life

Early years

Born in

Mestre Mestre () is a borough of the comune of Venice on the mainland opposite the historical island city in the region of Veneto, Italy. Administratively, Mestre forms (together with the nearby Carpenedo) the Municipalità di Mestre-Carpenedo, one ...

, near Venice in 1911, Broglio moved to Rome with family in 1915. Graduating in civil engineering in 1934, he began 3 years of military service as an artillery officer in the army. After his service Broglio applied to the Italian Airforce (''Aeronautica Militare Italiana'', AMI) becoming First Lieutenant where, using his engineering experience, he was assigned to work at the AMI research centre at

Guidonia Montecelio Guidonia Montecelio (), commonly known as Guidonia, is a town and ''comune'' in the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, Lazio, central Italy. Geography The municipality of Guidonia Montecelio, formed by the main towns of Guidonia and Montecelio, l ...

. He would work here on a variety of aerospace projects including jet engines until the Armistice in Italy during World War II in September 1943 when Broglio fled from occupying German forces and joined a partisan group. After the war he became dean of La Sapienza's school of aeronautical engineering in 1952, the successor to the rocket pioneer Gaetano Arturo Crocco. At the school he formed the ''Centro Ricerche Aerospaziali'' (CRA), establishing a

supersonic wind tunnel A supersonic wind tunnel is a wind tunnel that produces supersonic speeds (1.2

. In 1956 he was assigned leadership of air-force's ammunition research unit ''Direzione Generali Armi e Munitioni'' (DGAM), responsible for the military’s rocket programme, by General Secretary of Aeronautics Mario Pezzi. The unit ran the

Salto di Quirra Salto di Quirra is a restricted weapons testing range and rocket launch site near Perdasdefogu on the island of Sardinia. It is the largest military range in Italy, composed of 12,000 hectares of land owned by the Ministry of Defence (Italy), Ital ...

rocket test range on

Sardinia Sardinia ( ; ; ) is the Mediterranean islands#By area, second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, and one of the Regions of Italy, twenty regions of Italy. It is located west of the Italian Peninsula, north of Tunisia an ...

and Broglio would be involved in weather experiments using American Nike-Cajun rockets to release sodium clouds for study.

San Marco programme

With the launch of

Sputnik 1 Sputnik 1 (, , ''Satellite 1''), sometimes referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program ...

in 1957, there was a desire from many countries to pursue their own satellite research programmes. In Italy, the influential physicist

Edoardo Amaldi Edoardo Amaldi (5 September 1908 – 5 December 1989) was an Italian physicist. He coined the term "neutrino" in conversations with Enrico Fermi distinguishing it from the heavier "neutron". He has been described as "one of the leading nuclear p ...

in particular would press for the creation of an indigenous programme. Amaldi convinced Broglio to support the idea and both would eventually help form the Italian Space Research Commission, a branch of the National Research Council with the aim of gathering support for an Italian space endeavour. With Broglio as president of the commission, they were successful in lobbying the Italian government to support his proposal for a national programme to set up an offshore equatorial launch base with the support of

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

rockets and crew training. The programme would lead to the launch of the first Italian-built satellite, San Marco 1. San Marco 1 was not launched from the platform.

Later life

In the years after, Broglio continued to pursue his career in the Italian Air Force as well as his academic work at La Sapienza and, since its formation in 1988, also as a director of the

Italian Space Agency The Italian Space Agency (; ASI) is a government agency established in 1988 to fund, regulate and coordinate space exploration activities in Italy. The agency cooperates with numerous national and international entities who are active in aerospac ...

(ASI). When the decision was made in 1993 to downgrade the center in Kenya to a satellite ground station, Broglio withdrew from ASI's board of directors and went into retirement.

References

Bibliography

* Di Bernardo Nicolai, Giorgio. ''Nella nebbia, in attesa del Sole. Breve storia di Luigi Broglio, padre dell'astronautica italiana'' (2005)

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20101115170644/http://www.astronautix.com/astros/broglio.htm {{DEFAULTSORT:Broglio, Luigi Italian aerospace engineers Italian Air Force personnel Academic staff of the Sapienza University of Rome 1911 births 2001 deaths Engineers from Venice People from Mestre