Hermann Julius Oberth (German: [ˈhɛrman ˈjuːli̯ʊs ˈoːbɛrt]; 25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and rocket pioneer of Transylvanian Saxon descent. Oberth supported Nazi Germany's war effort and received the War Merit Cross (1st Class) in 1943.
Oberth was born into a Transylvanian Saxon family in Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt), Kingdom of Hungary (Sibiu in Romania); and besides his native German, he was fluent in Hungarian and Romanian as well. At the age of 11, Oberth's interest in rocketry was sparked by the novels of Jules Verne, especially From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. He was fond of reading them over and over until they were engraved in his memory. As a result, 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. During this time, however, he lacked the resources to put his ideas into practice.
In 1912, 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, Oberth was moved into a medical unit at a hospital in Segesvár (German: Schäßburg; Romanian: Sighișoara), Transylvania, in Austria-Hungary (Romania). There he found the spare time to conduct a series of experiments concerning weightlessness, and later resumed his rocketry designs. By 1917, he showed designs of a missile using liquid propellant with a range of 290 km (180 mi) to Hermann von Stein, the Prussian Minister of War.
On 6 July 1918, Oberth married Mathilde Hummel, with whom he had four children. Among Oberth's children, one lost his life as a soldier during World War II. His daughter Ilse (born 1924), died on August 28, 1944, in an accidental explosion at the Redl-Zipf V-2 rocket engine test facility and liquid oxygen plant where she worked as a rocket technician.
In 1919, Oberth once again moved to Germany, this time to study physics, initially in Munich and later at the University of Göttingen.
In 1922, Oberth's doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". However, professor Augustin Maior of the University of Cluj in Romania offered Oberth the opportunity to defend his dissertation there in order to receive a doctorate. He did so successfully on 23 May 1923. He had the 92-page work published privately in June 1923 as the somewhat controversial book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space). By 1929, Oberth had expanded that work to a 429-page book 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."
Oberth became in 1927 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, which included persons such as Wernher von Braun, Rolf Engel, Rudolf Nebel or Paul Ehmayr. Oberth lacked opportunities to work or to teach at the college or university level, as did many well-educated experts in the physical sciences and engineering during the 1920s 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 Mediaș, Romania.
During portions of 1928 and 1929, Oberth served as a scientific advisor in Berlin for the film Woman in the Moon, which was written by Thea von Harbou and directed and produced by Fritz Lang, in collaboration with the Universum Film AG company. The 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 inaugural Prix REP-Hirsch (REP-Hirsch Award) from the French Astronomical Society. This honor recognized his significant contributions to the field of astronautics and interplanetary travel, specifically highlighted in his book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt ("Ways to Spaceflight"). The book, an expanded version of Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("The Rocket to Interplanetary Space"), secured his position as a prominent figure in the field. The volume is dedicated to Lang and von Harbou.
Oberth's student Max Valier joined forces with Fritz von Opel to create the world's first large-scale experimental rocket program Opel-RAK, leading to speed records for ground and rail vehicles and the world's first rocket plane. Opel RAK.1, a purpose-built design by Julius Hatry, was demonstrated to the public and world media on September 30, 1929, piloted by von Opel. Valier's and von Opel's demonstrations had a strong and long-lasting impact on later spaceflight pioneers, in particular on another of Oberth's students, Wernher von Braun.
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 Rüsselsheim, Oberth conducted in the autumn of 1929 a static firing of his first liquid-fueled rocket motor, which he named the Kegeldüse. The engine was built by Klaus Riedel in a workshop space provided by the Reich Institution of Chemical Technology, and although it lacked a cooling system, it did run briefly. He 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. Indeed, Von Braun said of him:
Hermann Oberth was the first who, when thinking about the possibility of spaceships, grabbed a slide-rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs ... I, myself, owe to him not only the guiding-star of my life, but also my first contact with the theoretical and practical aspects of rocketry and space travel. A place of honor should be reserved in the history of science and technology for his ground-breaking contributions in the field of astronautics.
Basic research and technical drafts
In 1923, Oberth's book The Rocket to the Planetary Spaces was published. This publication is generally regarded as a kind of initial spark for rocket and space travel enthusiasm in Germany. Many later rocket engineers were inspired by his precise and comprehensive theoretical considerations and his bold conclusions. The work sparked heated debates, known at the time as the Battle of the Many Formulas. The second edition appeared in 1925, and it was also sold out after a short time.
In his book, Oberth puts forward the following theses:
Premise 1: With the current level of science and technology, the construction of machines that can fly higher than the Earth's atmosphere is likely.
Premise 2: With further refinement, these machines can reach such speeds that they do not have to fall back to the Earth's surface and are even able to leave the Earth's sphere of attraction.
Premise 3: Such machines can be built in such a way that people (probably without health problems) can ride up with them.