39 Facts About Hermann Oberth

Hermann Oberth was fond of reading them over and over until they were engraved in his memory.

In 1912, Hermann Oberth began studying medicine in Munich, Germany, but after World War I broke out, he was drafted into the Imperial German Army, assigned to an infantry battalion, and sent to the Eastern Front against Russia.

In 1915, Hermann Oberth was moved into a medical unit at a hospital in Segesvar, Transylvania, in Austria-Hungary.

On 6 July 1918, Hermann Oberth married Mathilde Hummel, with whom he had four children.

In 1919, Hermann Oberth moved to Germany, this time to study physics, initially in Munich and later at the University of Gottingen.

In 1922, Hermann Oberth's proposed doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian".

Hermann Oberth next had his 92-page work published privately in June 1923 as the somewhat controversial book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen.

Hermann Oberth commented later that he made the deliberate choice not to write another doctoral dissertation.

Therefore, from 1924 through 1938, Hermann Oberth supported himself and his family by teaching physics and mathematics at the Stephan Ludwig Roth High School in Medias, Romania.

Hermann Oberth designed the model of the Friede, the main rocket portrayed in the film.

On June 5,1929, Hermann Oberth won the inaugural Prix REP-Hirsch from the French Astronomical Society.

Shortly after the Opel RAK team's successful liquid-fuel rocket launches of April 10 and 12,1929 by Friedrich Wilhelm Sander at Opel Rennbahn in Russelsheim, Hermann Oberth conducted in the autumn of 1929 a static firing of his first liquid-fueled rocket motor, which he named the Kegelduse.

Hermann Oberth was helped in this experiment by an 18-year-old student Wernher von Braun, who would later become a giant in both German and American rocket engineering from the 1940s onward, culminating with the gigantic Saturn V rockets that made it possible for man to land on the Moon in 1969 and in several following years.

Hermann Oberth was the first who, when thinking about the possibility of spaceships, grabbed a slide-rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs.

In 1923, Hermann Oberth initially outlined the concept of his space mirrors in his book Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen.

Hermann Oberth emphasized that these mirrors could potentially serve as weapons.

In 2023, the space mirror devised by Hermann Oberth is categorized within the field of Climate Engineering, specifically under Solar Radiation Management as a subset of Space-Mirrors.

Hermann Oberth published his concept of a moving and jumping lunar vehicle for future, extensive lunar exploration in 1953.

Hermann Oberth presented at the 12th Rocket and Space Conference of the Deutsche Raketen-Gesellschaft in September 1963 in Hamburg, FRG a new idea for the electric spaceship.

From 1923 to 1938 Hermann Oberth worked with short breaks in 1929 and 1930 as a high school teacher for physics and mathematics in his home country Transylvania in Romania.

The Romanian Hermann Oberth, known worldwide in the professional world, with his many foreign contacts, was regarded as a security risk for the secrecy of the development work on Aggregate 4 in Peenemunde.

Hermann Oberth was not involved in this work, but placed in the patent review, and wrote various reports, for example "About the best outline of multi-stage rockets" and about "Defense against enemy planes with large, remote-controlled solid missile".

Hermann Oberth would have developed a solid fuel rocket for the V2's intended purposes.

Hermann Oberth fled from there in April 1945, had to go to two different US internment camps, was released in August 1945 as a "person unaffected by the Nazi era" and came to live with his family in Feucht FRG, where his family had already moved in 1943.

Hermann Oberth was not involved in the American "Project Paperclip" because he was not involved in the development of the Aggregat 4 - later called "Vergeltungswaffe V2".

That is why Hermann Oberth went to Switzerland in 1948 and worked there both as a scientific consultant and as an author for the specialist journal Interavia.

In 1953, Hermann Oberth returned to Feucht, Germany, to publish his book Menschen im Weltraum, in which he described his ideas for space-based reflecting telescopes, space stations, electric-powered spaceships, and space suits.

Hermann Oberth eventually worked from 1955 for his former assistant Wernher von Braun, who was developing space rockets for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama.

In 1958, Hermann Oberth returned to Feucht, Germany, where he published his ideas for a lunar exploration vehicle, a "moon catapult", and "damped" helicopters and airplanes.

In 1961, Hermann Oberth returned to the United States, where he worked for the Convair Corporation as a technical consultant for the Atlas missile program.

Hermann Oberth was a supporter of the extraterrestrial hypothesis for the origin of the UFOs that were seen from Earth.

Hermann Oberth published in the second edition of Flying Saucer Review, an article titled, "They Come From Outer Space".

Hermann Oberth discussed the history of reports of "strange luminous objects" in the sky, mentioning that the earliest historical case is of "Shining Shields" reported by Pliny the Elder.

In July 1969, Hermann Oberth returned to the United States to witness the launch of the Apollo project Saturn V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that carried the Apollo 11 crew on the first landing mission to the Moon.

The 1973 oil crisis inspired Hermann Oberth to look into alternative energy sources, including a plan for a wind power station that could utilize the jet stream.

Hermann Oberth returned to the United States to view the launch of STS-61-A, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched 30 October 1985.

Hermann Oberth died in Nuremberg, West Germany, on 28 December 1989, just shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Hermann Oberth was described as a "loyal supporter and donor" by Stille Hilfe, a Nazi support organisation, in its obituary of him.

Hermann Oberth discovered the Oberth effect, a fuel-saving strategy for interplanetary space flight that is commonly used today.