Rocket scientist Karel Bossart, Belgian star in the firmament
Belgium has produced astronauts many times in the past. Even an artist who has a statue on the moon. But did you also know that Kalmthout resident Karel Bossart was there at the birth of American space travel?
Karel Bossart was born in Antwerp in 1904. The clever lad grew up in nearby rural Kalmthout, in a teacher's family. His father decided school was not for him. He was just too smart for it. And maybe that was true as he could read, write letters and demonstrate mathematical ingenuity at just 3 or 4 years old. So his father home schooled him. After a crash course in French in Paris, the brilliant Charles was admitted to ULB in 1920, where he graduated with distinction in 1925 as a mining engineer. But his gaze was directed upwards. His talent and fascination with aerodynamics helped him secure a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. He received his master's degree in aeronautical engineering and aviation there in 1927.
Ever higher than Auguste Piccard
Karel Bossart gained his first work experience with seaplanes in the 1930s, with the Russian-American aircraft and helicopter manufacturer Igor Sikorsky. He specialised in strong metals and had a hand in the transition from wooden to aluminium aircraft. He helped design the first supersonic fighter with a delta wing. In 1945, most aircraft had a flight ceiling of a dozen or so kilometres, the Belgian-Swiss physicist and inventor Auguste Piccard had been as high as 34 km with a balloon but Karel Bossart aimed even higher. He found his inspiration in the V2, the ballistic missile that Wernher von Braun had built for Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, which was transferred to the United States after World War II. That, he said, could serve as the basis for an intercontinental missile. After many doubts, technical misgivings and struggles, Bossart, as head of Research and Development, managed to persuade the U.S. Air Force to agree to build what would be called the Atlas rocket, named after the Greek god who bears the heavens on his shoulders. The fact that the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949 probably helped the US change its mind. Although the Atlas was designed as a ballistic intercontinental missile in keeping with the arms race, it was soon adapted for space travel, which emerged in the 1950s. Its many successors served as launchers for commercial satellites.
In 1975, our compatriot rocket pioneer died in his home town in California, at the age of 71. By his own admission, nothing had ever been able to rival the beauty of his Kalmthout Heath, not even the immense expanse and variety of space.