Hermann Oberth

Hermann Oberth wrote the book in 1923 that convinced a generation of Germans that spaceflight was an engineering problem rather than a fantasy, and lived to watch Apollo 11 launch as an invited guest. He was a Transylvanian Saxon, born in what is now Romania, and his doctoral dissertation on rocket flight was rejected by Heidelberg as too speculative; he published it himself as The Rocket into Planetary Space, and remarked that he could have got a doctorate somewhere else but chose to be a better scientist than one needed to be. The book set out the mathematics of multi-stage liquid-fuelled rockets, orbital mechanics and the physiological effects of acceleration, and it reached Wernher von Braun as a schoolboy, who joined the amateur rocket society Oberth helped found. He worked as a technical adviser on Fritz Lang's Frau im Mond in 1929, where the countdown was invented for dramatic effect and was then adopted by real launch crews, and he was supposed to build a working rocket for the premiere, which failed. He worked at Peenemunde under von Braun during the war, in a subordinate position that he found humiliating, on the programme that produced the V-2 - a weapon built by concentration camp labour that killed more people in its construction than in its use. Afterwards he worked in Switzerland, Italy and then for the US Army at Huntsville, again under von Braun, before retiring to Germany in 1962. He held eccentric views on UFOs and, late in life, on politics that his admirers pass over. He is one of the three men, with Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, usually called the fathers of rocketry, and he never met either. He was at Cape Canaveral for the Apollo 11 launch as von Braun s guest. He died in Nuremberg in December 1989, the month the Romanian regime fell in the country he had been born in.

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