Hermann Oberth, German Physicist and Engineer
Photograph of Oberth taken in 1958 while he was living in the United States. Hermann Julius Oberth (June 25, 1894 - December 28, 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. In 1922, his proposed doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". By 1929, he had expanded his original 92 work into a 429 page book titled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (Ways to Spaceflight). In parts of 1928 and 1929, he worked in 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), directed by Fritz Lang. He built and launched a rocket as a publicity event before the film's premiere, and he designed the model of the "Friede", the main rocket portrayed in the film. In 1941 he worked on Nazi German rocketry projects, including the V-2 rocket weapon, and on solid-propellant anti-aircraft rockets. In 1953 he published 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. He eventually came to work for his former student, Wernher von Braun, who was developing space rockets for NASA. In 1969, he returned to the US to witness the launch of the Apollo project Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 crew on the first landing mission to the Moon. He died in 1989, at the age of 95.
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