Luigi Broglio

Luigi Broglio ( born November 11, 1911 in Mestre, Veneto, † 14 January 2001 ) was an Italian general and space pioneer. An asteroid and the Italian Space Centre in Malindi in Kenya have been named after him.

Life

Broglio, the son of an artillery officer, had lived since 1915 in Rome, where he attended school and graduated in 1934 to study engineering. The military service he rendered to 1937 as in the artillery and was a reserve officer. Shortly thereafter, he took part in a competition of the Italian Air Force, which took him as a first lieutenant and engineer in her research in Guidonia Monte Celio in Rome. Here he worked until September 1943 on various projects, including the development of jet engines for fighter aircraft. After the armistice and the German occupation of Rome he joined the partisan group of Paolo Emilio Taviani later Italian defense minister.

After the war, Broglio remained in the Air Force, but also worked as a university lecturer at the Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Rome, as well as a guest lecturer in Spain and in the USA. In 1952 he was Dean of the Faculty and the successor of the rocket pioneer Gaetano Arturo Crocco. Broglio erected in his faculty, among others, a supersonic wind tunnel (Mach 4). On the east coast of Sardinia, he set up a small rocket launch site for sounding rockets at Capo San Lorenzo. Since 1961, Broglio worked in collaboration with NASA on the " San Marco - project" which envisaged the construction of Italian satellite and a rocket launch site on a platform ( San Marco platform) off the coast of Kenya. The first satellite was launched from there on December 15, 1964 into space.

In the years after Broglio was still active in both the Italian Air Force, as well as at the University of Rome and since 1988 also in the Italian Agenzia Spaziale Italiana Space Agency. When they finally decided to downgrade their location in Kenya at a satellite control center, located Broglio 1993 withdrew into retirement.