38 Facts About Hermann Oberth

Hermann Julius Oberth was a Transylvanian Saxon physicist and engineer.

Hermann Oberth is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard and Herman Potocnik.

Hermann Oberth was fluent in Hungarian and in the Romanian language.

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.

In parts of 1928 and 1929, Hermann Oberth worked in Berlin as a scientific consultant on the film, Frau im Mond, which was directed and produced by the great film pioneer Fritz Lang at the Universum Film AG company.

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

On 5 June 1929, Hermann Oberth won the first Prix REP-Hirsch of the French Astronomical Society for the encouragement of astronautics in his book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt that had expanded Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen to a full-length book.

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 1938, the Hermann Oberth family left Sibiu, Romania, for good, to first settle in Austria, then in Nazi Germany, then in the United States, and finally back to a democratic West Germany.

Hermann Oberth himself moved on first to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, Austria, then to the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany.

Hermann Oberth moved to Peenemunde, Germany, in 1941 to work on the Aggregat rocket program.

Around the end of World War II in Europe, the Hermann Oberth family moved to the town of Feucht, near the regional capital of Nuremberg, which became part of the American Zone of occupied Germany, and the location of the high-level war-crimes trials of the surviving Nazi leaders.

Hermann Oberth was allowed to leave Nuremberg to move to Switzerland in 1948, where he worked as an independent consultant and a writer.

In 1950, Hermann Oberth moved on to Italy, where he completed some of the work that he had begun at the WASAG organization for the new Italian Navy.

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

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.

Hermann Oberth eventually came to work for his former student, Wernher von Braun, who was developing space rockets for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama.

In 1958, Hermann Oberth was back in Feucht, Germany, where he published his ideas on a lunar exploration vehicle, a "lunar catapult", and on "muffled" helicopters and airplanes.

In 1960, back in the United States again, Hermann Oberth went to work for the Convair Corporation as a technical consultant on the Atlas rocket program.

Space mirrors in orbit around the earth, as designed by Hermann Oberth, are intended to focus sunlight on individual regions of the earth's surface or deflect it into space so that the solar radiation is weakened in a specifically controlled manner for individual regions on the earth's surface.

For cost reasons, Hermann Oberth's concept envisages that the components on the moon should be produced from lunar minerals, because its lower gravitational pull requires less energy to launch the components into lunar orbit.

Hermann Oberth pointed out that these mirrors could be used as a weapon.

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 discovered the Oberth effect, in which a rocket engine when traveling at high speed generates more useful energy than one travelling at low speed.