Hermann Julius Oberth (25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989), born in Transylvania, was a Romanian and German physicist and engineer of Saxon ancestry, who along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert H. Goddard, was one of the Founding Fathers of rocketry and astronautics. The three never were active collaborators, and in fact, never knew one another: instead, their parallel achievements occurred independently of one another.
Oberth's Early life
Oberth was born to a Saxon family in Hermannstadt/Nagyszeben, (now Sibiu/Hermannstadt, Romania).By his own account and that of many others, around the age of 11 years old, Oberth became fascinated with the field in which he was to make his mark through reading the writings of Jules Verne, especially From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, re-reading them to the point of memorization. Influenced by Verne's books and ideas, Oberth constructed his first model rocket as a school student at the age of 14. In his youthful experiments, he arrived independently at the concept of the multistage rocket, but he lacked then the resources to pursue his idea on any but a pencil-and-paper level.
In 1912, Oberth began the study of medicine in Munich, Germany, but at the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted into the Imperial German Army, assigned to an infantry battalion, and sent to the Eastern Front against Russia. In 1915, Oberth was moved into a medical unit at a hospital in Segesvár, Transylvania, in Austria-Hungary.There he found the spare time to conduct a series of experiments concerning weightlessness, and later resumed his rocketry designs. By 1917, he showed how far his studies had reached so far by firing a rocket with liquid propellant in a demonstration to Hermann von Stein, the Prussian Minister of War.
On July 6, 1918, Oberth married Mathilde Hummel, with whom he had four children. Among these were a son who died as a soldier in World War II, and a daughter who also died during the war when there was an accidental explosion at a liquid oxygen plant where she was in August 1944. In 1919, Oberth once again moved to Germany, this time to study physics, initially in Munich and later in Göttingen.
In 1922, Oberth's proposed doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". He next had his 92-page work published privately in June 1923 as the somewhat controversial book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("By Rocket into Planetary Space"). By 1929, Oberth had expanded this work to a 429-page book titled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt ("Ways to Spaceflight"). Oberth commented later that he made the deliberate choice not to write another doctoral dissertation. He wrote, "I refrained from writing another one, thinking to myself: Never mind, I will prove that I am able to become a greater scientist than some of you, even without the title of Doctor."Oberth criticized the German system of education, saying "Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward, things are barely discernible." Hermann Oberth was finally his doctorate in physics with the same rocketry paper that he had written before, by the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, under professor Augustin Maior, on May 23, 1923.Oberth became a member of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) - the "Spaceflight Society" - an amateur rocketry group that had taken great inspiration from his book, and Oberth acted as something of a mentor to the enthusiasts who joined the Society. Oberth lacked the opportunties to work or to teach at the college or university level, as did many well-educated experts in the physical sciences and engineering in the time period of the 1920 through the 1930s - with the situation becoming much worse during the worldwide Great Depression that started in 1929. Therefore, from 1924 through 1938, Oberth supported himself and his family by teaching physics and mathematics at the Stephan Ludwig Roth High School in Mediaş, Romania.
In parts of 1928 and 1929, Oberth also worked in Berlin, Germany as a scientific consultant on the first film ever to have scenes set in outer space, Frau im Mond ("The Woman in the Moon"), which was directed and produced by the great film pioneer Fritz Lang at the Universum Film AG company. This film was of enormous value in popularizing the ideas of rocketry and space exploration. One of Oberth's main assignments was to build and launch a rocket as a publicity event just before the film's premiere. He also designed the model of the "Friede", the main rocket portrayed in the film. On June 5, 1929, Oberth won the first (Robert Esnault-Pelterie - André-Louis Hirsch) "Rep-Hirsch Prize" of the French Astronomical Society for the encouragement of astronautics in his book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt ("Ways to Spaceflight") that had expanded Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen to a full-length book.
In the autumn of 1929, Oberth conducted a static firing of his first liquid-fueled rocket motor, which he named the Kegeldüse. He was helped in this experiment by his students at the Technical University of Berlin, one of whom was 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 men to land on the Moon in 1969 and in several following years.
In 1938, the Oberth family left Sibiu, Romania, for good, to first to settle in Austria, then in Nazi Germany, then in the United States, and finally back to a free Germany. Oberth himself moved on first to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, Austria, then the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany. (A Hochschule is rather like a four-year technical insitute, above a high school, but not as highly-regarded, or offering as many years of study as a university does.) Oberth moved to Peenemünde, Germany, in 1941 to work on Nazi German rocketry projects, including the V-2 rocket weapon, and in about September 1943, he was awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz I Klasse mit Schwertern (War Merit Cross 1st Class, with Swords) for his "outstanding, courageous behavior … during the attack" on Peenemünde by Operation Hydra.Oberth later worked on solid-propellant anti-aircraft rockets at the German WASAG military organization near Wittenberg. Around the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, the Oberth family moved to the town of Feucht, near Nuremberg, Germany, which became part of the American Zone of occupied Germany, and also the location of the high-level war-crimes trials of the surviving Nazi leaders. Oberth was allowed to leave Nurmberg to move to Switzerland in 1948, where he worked as an independent rocketry consultant and a writer.
In 1950, 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, Oberth returned to Feucht, Germany, to publish his book Menschen im Weltraum (Men in Space), in which he described his ideas for space-based reflecting telescopes, space stations, electric-powered spaceships, and space suits.During the 1950s and 1960s, as a sideline, Oberth offered his opinions regarding unidentified flying objects (UFOs). He was a supporter of the extraterrestrial hypothesis for the origin of the UFOs that were seen at the Earth. For example, in an article in The American Weekly magazine of October 24, 1954, Obert stated, "It is my thesis that flying saucers are real, and that they are space ships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our earth for centuries..."
Oberth eventually came to work for his former student, Wernher von Braun, who was developing space rockets for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. (See also List of German rocket scientists in the United States). Among other things, Oberth was involved in writing the study, The Development of Space Technology in the Next Ten Years. In 1958, 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, Oberth went to work for the Convair Corporation as a technical consultant on the Atlas rocket program.
Oberth's Later life
Oberth retired in 1962 at the age of 68. From 1965 to 1967 he was a member of the considered to be far right National Democratic Party. In July 1969, 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 petroleum crisis inspired Oberth to look into alternative energy sources, including a plan for a wind power station that could utilize the jet stream. However, his primary interest during his retirement years was to turn to more abstract philosophical questions. Most notable among his several books from this period is Primer For Those Who Would Govern.
Oberth died in Nuremberg, Germany, on 28 December 1989, just shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain that had for so long divided Germany into two countries.
Oberth's Legacy
There is also a crater on the Moon named for Oberth (see Oberth (crater)).
The Oberth effect is named after him.
The science-fiction movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock mentions the Oberth-class of starships hypothetically to be in his honor. Later on, this same class of starships is mentioned in several episodes of the American TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa features Hermann Oberth as the "teacher" of the movie's protagonist, "Edward Elric". Oberth is also mentioned in the last episode of the TV series Fullmetal Alchemist. In this episode, Elric has heard of a great scientist, named "Oberth", with curious theories. The last moments of the series depict Elric on board a train on his way to meet Oberth, determined to study rocketry with him.
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