Hermann Oberth

German rocket scientist

• Born: June 25, 1894
• Birthplace: Hermannstadt, Siebenburgen, Transylvania
• Died: December 29, 1989
• Place of death: Nürnberg, West Germany (now in Germany)

Oberth is one of the three great pioneers of the sciences of astronautics and modern rocketry. Along with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert H. Goddard, he is credited with developing the principles behind rocket-powered flight beyond Earth’s atmosphere, liquid-fueled rockets, a piloted Earth orbital space station, and piloted interplanetary flight.

Early Life

Hermann Julius Oberth (OH-behrt) was born in Hermannstadt, Siebenburgen, Transylvania, a part of what is modern Romania. His father, Julius Oberth, was a physician who stressed learning to his son from an early age. The younger Oberth attended elementary and high school in the town of Schaessburg until 1913, when he entered the University of Munich to study medicine, as had his father. Oberth, like fellow rocketry pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia and Robert H. Goddard in the United States, was heavily influenced in his formative years by the emerging genre of science fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that detailed possible methods of traveling into space. Indeed, in his later years Oberth acknowledged that his mother’s gift of Jules Verne’s books in his eleventh year helped shape the course of the rest of his life.

When World War I started in 1914, the twenty-year-old Oberth joined the German army’s medical service. This experience gave him a strong distaste for the healing arts and convinced him to pursue another area of endeavor as his life’s work. Turning to his childhood fascination with the concept of spaceflight, he chose mathematics and physics to be his new fields of study.

After leaving the army medical service, Oberth returned to the University of Munich and began his studies. He also studied at Göttingen and Heidelberg before receiving his schoolmaster’s diploma in July, 1923. Returning to Siebenburgen, he began work as a fifth-grade teacher of mathematics and physics. Later he taught in the German town of Mediasch, where he made his home until 1938. He later took German citizenship. It was during his service in Germany in World War I that he unsuccessfully proposed that the German government build liquid-fueled bombardment missiles, the forerunners of the modern Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

Oberth continued to read and theorize about the prospects of rocket-powered space flight. This avocation led to the publication of his first and best-known work on astronautics, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1923; the rocket into interplanetary space). It was this seminal work’s worldwide popularity that gave Oberth an international reputation as an expert in astronautics.

Life’s Work

Oberth’s Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen and an expanded version of the book published in 1929, Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (Ways to Spaceflight , 1972), put forth numerous ideas that were to form the basis of the German missile program in World War II and the ongoing American and Soviet piloted and unpiloted space programs. These included the theory that a liquid-fueled rocket could propel an object through the airless void of space and that the vehicle could develop sufficient velocity and centrifugal force to counterbalance Earth’s gravity and remain in orbit around the planet. He also theorized that the vehicle could move quickly enough to break free of Earth’s gravity and move into interplanetary space.

Moving beyond the theory of propulsion, Oberth hypothesized the potential effects of space travel on the human body and was the first to coin the phrase “space station” to mean a permanent piloted facility in Earth orbit. Although he developed his theories independently of his peers, Oberth’s two books confirmed both Tsiolkovsky’s theoretical work on rocket propulsion and Goddard’s practical experience in rocketry, and moved Oberth to the pinnacle of the rapidly developing field. Both before and after the publication of his first books he maintained active correspondence with both men until their deaths.

In 1928, Oberth was given the chance to put the theories he had developed into practice when he became the technical adviser to the famous film director Fritz Lang and the Ufa film company for the motion picture Die Frau im Mond. As part of his service to Ufa, he was asked to build and fly a liquid-fueled rocket to promote the film. Unfortunately, the rocket Oberth constructed was unable to fly, and the film company ran out of development funds before he was able to correct the design. Oberth was, however, able to test-fire a rocket engine successfully in 1930 as part of the project.

An active and vocal proponent of space exploration, Oberth helped found in 1927 the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR), Germany’s first society for space travel. In addition to Oberth, who was elected the society’s first president, the group’s first members included such pioneers of aeronautics and rocketry as Willy Ley and an eighteen-year-old student of Oberth by the name of Wernher von Braun. The VfR’s development paralleled the founding of similar groups elsewhere in the world, including the Moscow Group for the Study of Reactive Propulsion, whose members included the future chief designer of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev, and aircraft designer Andrei Nikolayevich Tupolev. The VfR and other of these groups both built and flew rudimentary rockets and sponsored public displays on rocketry such as the one built by Oberth and von Braun in a Berlin department store to educate the public about their work.

In 1930, the VfR was given a parcel of land outside Berlin to conduct practical experiments in rocketry. This empty field, which was once an ammunition dump for the German army, was called Raketenflugplatz Berlin (rocket field Berlin). Oberth and the VfR spent the next two years conducting experiments there before the German army developed an interest in their work and recruited several of the VfR’s members into service developing ordnance. During this period, Oberth supported himself by teaching mathematics and physics at the technical universities in Vienna and Dresden, as well as by publishing his research in astronautics in numerous books and articles. In 1941, he went to work for his former student von Braun as a member of the team of scientists at the German rocket-development center in Heeresversuchsstelle, Peenemünde.

At Peenemünde, von Braun and Oberth developed and then successfully launched the Vengeance weapons, the V-1 and V-2 rockets. The V-1 “Buzz Bomb” was a short-range, rocket-powered winged bomb, while the V-2 was a powerful ballistic missile able to span hundreds of miles to deliver its deadly payload. With the approval in June, 1943, of Adolf Hitler, the V-2 went into mass production. The first operational V-2 missile was launched on September 8, 1944, at London, England, from the Hague, the Netherlands.

In 1943, Oberth transferred to the Rheinsdorf aircraft facility near Wittenberg, Germany, where he remained for the duration of World War II. After the war, he left Germany unnoticed by the Allies and moved to Switzerland, where he lived in seclusion until 1949. Oberth’s research into rocketry resumed in 1949 at Oberried am Brienzer Lake and, later, for the Italian navy at La Spezia, Italy. During these years, he also gained considerable recognition from the growing international community of rocket scientists. His theories were being put to use by both the United States with its early V-2 tests and its own Viking rocket, and by the Soviet Union under Sergei Korolev and his larger, more powerful rockets.

During these years and later, Oberth continued to publish both technical materials and popular treatises on practical concepts of space travel. His later books and articles, including Menschen im Weltraum (1954; Man into Space: New Projects for Rocket and Space Travel , 1957) and Stoff und Leben (1959; matter and life), were well received both by the scientific community and by the general public. He was the recipient of numerous awards during his long career, including the REP Hirsch Award of the Société Astronomique de France, of which he was the first to be so honored in 1925, and the coveted Galabert Prize in 1962. As one of the pioneers of space travel, he was also invited to lecture and participate in many international conferences and programs on astronautics and rocketry. One of the honors he is known to have most prized, however, was having been invited to participate in the realization of his dream of interplanetary space travel as a witness to the launch of Apollo 11, the first piloted landing on the moon, in 1969.

In 1955, Oberth again went to work for his former student von Braun at the Technical Feasibility Studies Office of the Ordnance Missile Laboratories in the United States. In 1956, he transferred to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency with von Braun to assist in the development of the Redstone Rocket, one of the United States’ first liquid-fueled boosters and the backbone of the early U.S. space program. Two years later, Oberth returned to Germany in semiretirement.

Significance

Hermann Oberth was one of the first great idealists of space travel in the modern age. He, along with his contemporaries Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, had the knowledge and the passion to take the fantasy of science fiction and turn it into the reality of science fact. Through their vision, they forged a new understanding of their world. Oberth’s theories, enumerated in his books, showed how the laws of physics could be put to use to conquer the heavens. He theorized about the first space station and gave a detailed, startlingly accurate account of how microgravity would affect the human body on long space voyages. These writings, along with his seminal works about reaction propulsion of a space vehicle and liquid-fueled rockets, gave future engineers and scientists a path to follow in making space travel a reality.

While his work at Peenemünde helped develop weapons of destruction, he was a man who believed deeply in the peaceful pursuit of space. He urged international cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early days of the space race, even going so far as asking Nikita S. Khrushchev to allow him to work with Sergei Korolev in the development of the Soviet space program. One of Oberth’s most direct contributions to the progress of space travel was the encouragement he gave to the rocketry enthusiasts of his day, such as Wernher von Braun. Von Braun took the knowledge he gained from Oberth, expanded on it, and made space travel a reality by developing the launch vehicles that carried men to the moon and the unpiloted probes that traveled beyond the solar system.

Bibliography

Braun, Wernher von, and Frederick I. Ordway III. The History of Rocketry and Space Travel. 3d rev. ed. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975. As one of the unequaled giants in modern rocketry, von Braun brings to this well-written and easily understandable compendium a unique and fascinating perspective. An excellent starting point for the layperson for information on the early days of the American space program.

Gruntman, Mike. Blazing the Trial: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry. Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004. Includes information about Oberth and other pioneers of rocketry.

Hurt, Harry, III. For All Mankind. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. Gives an overview of the American space program through the Apollo lunar landings. An accompanying volume to a documentary on the astronauts who flew the lunar landing missions.

Huzel, Dieter K. Peenemünde to Canaveral. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. This insider’s account of the German rocket program during World War II is fast-paced and reads like a novel. Of interest to anyone who wishes to learn more about the proving ground for much of the technology in use in the modern space race.

McAleer, Neil. The Omni Space Almanac: A Complete Guide to the Space Age. New York: World Almanac, 1987. A compendium of information about the major developments of the space age, with emphasis on the modern years and their import for the future.

Oberth, Hermann. Man into Space: New Projects for Rocket and Space Travel. Translated by G. P. H. De Freville. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. This book, one of Oberth’s last, is a scholarly approach to space travel, written on the eve of the modern space age. While it contains some technical information, the book is written in easily understandable language for the layperson or amateur space enthusiast.

Stuhlinger, Ernst, et al., eds. Astronautical Engineering and Science, from Peenemünde to Planetary Space: Honoring the Fiftieth Birthday of Wernher von Braun. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. Written by von Braun’s colleagues from Peenemünde, the U.S. Army missile program, the Marshall Space Center, and Cape Canaveral, this collection of essays on space technology and exploration is excellent. Oberth contributed a paper on an electrical rocket engine that is well written and informative.

Sutton, George Paul. History of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines. Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2006. Features a description of Oberth’s launch vehicle concepts.