PEDRO PAULET

1874 – 1945
Pedro Eleodoro Paulet Mostajo was an Engineer, Researcher and Scientist who was born in the
Tiabaya district located in the city of Arequipa, Peru, on July 2, 1874, and his parents were
Pedro Paulet and Antonina Mostajo y Quiroz.
Pedro Paulet was an active and ideal student for science and passionate about art and from
childhood he showed a great interest in traveling to space.
As a child, he read Jules Verne's novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon and
under that inspiration and Newton's Third Law (action and reaction) he experimented with
building his own rockets.
Pedro Paulet studied Sciences and Letters at the San Agustín University in his hometown, but
dropped out at the age of 18. At age 19, after getting a scholarship, he transferred to the
Sorbonne University in Paris, where he studied Chemical Engineering and Architecture.
At the end of the 19th century, in the institute's workshops, Pedro invented the liquid fuel rocket
motor, also in those years, he managed to finish the design of the clumsy plane, a spherical
spacecraft with a spearhead, which would be powered by its jet engine.
Pedro Paulet returned to Peru in 1905 to direct the School of Arts and Crafts. He planned to
support Peruvian engineers to industrialize the country and turn it into a power so that he could
manufacture his airplane.
In 1927, with the rise of aeronautics and propulsion engines, the newspaper El Comercio
published the news of Pedro Paulet's highly superior rocket plane, designed 30 years before and
which was placed at the service of the national industry, but did not obtain the deserved support.
However, the news reached the German Astronautical Society, where he was recognized as one
of the pioneers of rocket engines, the only ones capable of traveling into space.
Pedro Paulet died in 1945 in Argentina.
His formulas and experiments served as a reference for the main designers of the US space
agency NASA and, therefore, the Peruvian is considered the father of astronautics and a pioneer
of the space age.