A sixteenth-century manuscript from Sibiu placed staged rockets, fins, and propulsion ideas in Renaissance Europe long before they entered the usual timeline of rocketry.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, in a fortified Transylvanian city better known for guilds, walls, and arsenals than visions of flight, a military engineer wrote down rocket ideas that still look startlingly modern. The Sibiu Manuscript matters because it does not trade in vague legend. It preserves technical thinking about staged rockets, propulsion, and weapon design in enough detail to force a serious rethink of how early that line of engineering had already advanced.
The document now called the Sibiu Manuscript was not famous in its own age and did not enter modern discussion until the twentieth century. It surfaced in the State Archives of Sibiu in 1961, written in old German and bound as a composite volume with work by three authors. Conrad Haas wrote the final and most important section for the history of rocketry, a long technical treatise produced sometime between 1529 and 1569, when he was active in Sibiu, then known in German as Hermannstadt.
A manuscript out of sequence
What gives the manuscript its charge is the sense that it has slipped out of sequence. The standard public story of early rocketry usually moves from Chinese fire arrows to festival rockets, then forward to better-known early modern writers such as Johann Schmidlap and Kazimierz Siemienowicz. Haas belongs in that sequence too, and he belongs there earlier than most readers expect. A 1976 historical study preserved in NASA’s Technical Reports Server treated the Sibiu document not as a curiosity but as an important source on the development of powder rockets. In that paper, the manuscript is described as the oldest known document then identified to contain definite data on the construction of multi-stage rockets.
That does not mean Haas invented every part of later rocketry from scratch, and the manuscript does not have to carry that burden. Its importance is more concrete. It records a set of designs, experiments, and working principles that show Renaissance engineers were thinking harder and more systematically about rocket propulsion than the familiar timeline usually suggests. The manuscript is old enough to surprise. Its technical texture is what makes the surprise stick.
An arsenal master in Sibiu
Conrad Haas himself remains partly obscure, which only sharpens the document. The surviving outlines place him as an artillery officer and engineer linked to Habsburg service, later active in Sibiu’s arsenal. The official Austrian Space Pioneers project describes him as a figure who probably came to Transylvania with imperial troops and became chief of the artillery camp of the arsenal at Hermannstadt. That career matters because the manuscript does not read like fantasy. It grows out of the workshop world of powder, metals, ignition, measurement, and siege craft.
Haas’s rocket chapter includes drawings of two-stage and three-stage rockets, along with other combinations and launch concepts. In the NASA paper’s transcription, the shift from two stages to three is presented as a practical extension of designs that Haas and local pyrotechnists were already working through. The idea is recognizably the one that still governs staging today. A first propulsion phase burns, hands off ignition, and a later phase continues the flight. The forms are primitive by modern standards. The principle is not.
This is where the manuscript stops feeling like a historical novelty and starts reading like engineering. Haas was not simply doodling rockets in the margins of a war manual. He was working through how they were built, how they might be stabilized, how power could be extended, and how a device might be arranged to do more than one thing in sequence. That kind of thinking is why the Sibiu Manuscript still draws attention far outside local history.
More than a rocket manual
The rockets get the headlines, but the manuscript is broader than that. It belongs to the larger world of artillery, pyrotechnics, and military technology. The European Digital Treasures project describes Haas’s work as part of a larger bound volume and notes that his section includes numerous rocket types, color illustrations, and technical writing that ranges across the practical problems of construction. The manuscript’s value lies partly in that breadth. It preserves an engineer’s working environment, not just a single bright idea.
That wider frame makes the text easier to trust. Haas was writing in a culture that cared intensely about guns, powder, fortifications, and controlled fire. Rockets belonged to that world before they belonged to astronomy. Their first arena was not the vacuum of space but the smoky logic of arsenals and battlefields. Yet within that martial setting, Haas pushed beyond simple firework ascent or battlefield shock. He treated rockets as machines whose performance could be improved through structure and sequencing. That is the leap that keeps his manuscript alive.
There is another detail that gives the manuscript human shape. Haas closed his treatise in a decidedly anti-war spirit, urging peace rather than destruction. The line survives in paraphrase and translation across later scholarship, and while it should not be romanticized, it does complicate the image of a man buried in weapons design. He was an arsenal engineer, but he was not writing with simple bloodlust. The manuscript belongs to the Renaissance habit of practical invention, where curiosity, violence, craftsmanship, and ambition often lived on the same page.
Before the standard timeline
For a long time, the better-known landmarks of early rocket literature came later. Johann Schmidlap’s step rocket, devised for lifting fireworks higher, became a familiar reference point in rocket history. A century after Haas, Kazimierz Siemienowicz’s Artis Magnae Artilleriae spread rocket knowledge widely across Europe and served for generations as a standard artillery and pyrotechnic manual. Those books earned their place. What the Sibiu Manuscript changes is the date at which staged rocket thinking can be documented in Europe.
That adjustment is not trivial. Siemienowicz published in 1650. Haas was writing decades earlier, and in the view of the historical study preserved by NASA, his manuscript contained definite data on multi-stage construction before those later works took on their canonical status. The point is not to turn rocket history into a race for first place. The point is that the Sibiu material expands the map. It shows that sophisticated rocket thinking was already present in sixteenth-century Central Europe, in manuscript form, before print fixed later names in the public memory.
Where the claim stops
The Sibiu Manuscript also attracts exaggeration, especially when modern readers try to drag it too close to astronautics. Some later interpretations have pushed Haas toward ideas of crewed flight, and the Austrian profile notes a drawing that has been read as a naive precursor to a space station or inhabited vehicle. That is where the ground becomes less secure. The manuscript unquestionably contains advanced rocket concepts for its time. It does not give us a Renaissance moon program.
The stronger reading is also the more interesting one. Haas was thinking like an engineer in a world that had the materials, combustion knowledge, and military need to experiment with rockets, but not the industrial base to turn those designs into modern launch vehicles. His manuscript shows a mind working on staging, stability, fuel mixtures, and performance long before the space age gave those problems their present scale. That is impressive enough without inflating the case into science fiction written in old German script.
What survives, then, is a hard, durable conclusion. In Sibiu, sometime between 1529 and 1569, Conrad Haas recorded multi-stage rockets and related propulsion ideas with a degree of technical clarity that still unsettles the usual story of early rocketry. The manuscript does not prove that sixteenth-century Europe was ready for spaceflight. It proves that one engineer in Transylvania had already begun thinking along a line that the modern world would later follow much farther.
