Editing Conrad Haas (section)

{{Short description|Austrian military engineer}}
{{for|the 24 character|List of 24 characters#24: Season 5}}
[[File:Conrad Haas.jpg|thumb|Description of a rocket by Conrad Haas]]

'''Conrad Haas''' (1509&ndash;1576) was an Austrian or [[Transylvanian Saxons|Transylvanian Saxon]] [[military engineer]].
He was a pioneer of [[rocket propulsion]]. His designs include a [[multistage rocket|three-stage rocket]] and a manned rocket.

Haas was possibly born in Dornbach (now part of [[Hernals]], [[Vienna]]). 
He held the post of the ''Zeugwart'' (arsenal master) of the [[Imperial Army (Holy Roman Empire)|Imperial Habsburg army]] under [[Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor|Ferdinand I]].  In 1551, [[Stephen Báthory]], the grand prince of [[Transylvania]] invited Haas to Nagyszeben ({{langx|de|Hermannstadt}}), [[Eastern Hungarian Kingdom]] (now [[Sibiu]], [[Romania]]), where he acted as weapons engineer and also he started to teach at [[Klausenburg]] (now [[Cluj-Napoca]]).

[[File:Rocket of Conrad Haas.png|thumb|Multistage rocket designed by Haas]]
He wrote a German-language treatise on rocket technology, involving the combination of [[fireworks]] and weapons technologies. This manuscript was discovered in 1961, in the Sibiu public records (Sibiu public records ''Varia II 374'').
His work also dealt with the theory of motion of multi-stage rockets, different fuel mixtures using [[liquid fuel]], and introduced [[Delta (letter)|delta]]-shape [[fin]]s and bell-shaped [[nozzle]]s.

In the last paragraph of his chapter on the military use of rockets, he wrote (translated):
<blockquote>"But my advice is for more peace and no war, leaving the rifles calmly in storage, so the bullet is not fired, the gunpowder is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his money, the arsenal master his life; that is the advice Conrad Haas gives."</blockquote>

[[Johann Schmidlap]], a German fireworks maker, is believed to have experimented with staging in 1590, using a design he called "step rockets." Before the discovery of Haas' manuscript, the first description of the three-stage rocket was credited to the artillery specialist [[Casimir Siemienowicz]], from the [[Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth]], in his 1650 work, ''Artis Magnae Artilleriae Pars Prima'' ("Great Art of Artillery, Part One").