Oberth, Hermann Julius

Hermann Oberth, (born June 25, 1894, Nagyszeben, Austria-Hungary [now Sibiu, Rom.]—died Dec. 29, 1989, Nürnberg, W.Ger.), German scientist who is considered to be one of the founders of modern astronautics.

The son of a prosperous physician, Oberth studied medicine in Munich, but his education was interrupted by service in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. After being wounded in the war, he found time to pursue his studies in astronautics. He performed experiments to simulate weightlessness and worked out a design for a long-range, liquid-propellant rocket that his commanding officer sent to the War Ministry. The design was rejected as a fantasy. After the war Oberth sought a Ph.D. degree at the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation based on his rocket design. It was rejected by the university in 1922, but Oberth partially underwrote publishing expenses, and it appeared as Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1923; “The Rocket into Interplanetary Space”). The book, which explained mathematically how rockets could achieve a speed that would allow them to escape Earth’s gravitational pull, gained Oberth widespread recognition.

Until 1922 he was unfamiliar with the work of Robert Goddard in the United States and, until 1925, with that of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the Soviet Union. After corresponding with both men, he acknowledged their precedence in deriving the equations associated with space flight. Oberth’s Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (1929; Ways to Spaceflight) won the first annual Robert Esnault-Pelterie–André Hirsch Prize of 10,000 francs, enabling him to finance his research on liquid-propellant rocket motors. The book anticipated by 30 years the development of electric propulsion and of the ion rocket. In 1931 Oberth received a patent for a liquid-propellant rocket from the Romanian Patent Office, and the first rocket was launched on May 7, 1931, near Berlin.

In 1938 Oberth joined the faculty of the Technical University of Vienna. He became a German citizen in 1940 and in 1941 transferred to the German rocket development centre at Peenemünde, where he worked for Wernher von Braun, his former assistant.

In 1943 he was sent to another location to work on solid-propellant antiaircraft rockets. He spent a year in Switzerland after the war as a rocket consultant, and in 1950 he moved to Italy, where he worked on solid-propellant antiaircraft rockets for the Italian navy. In the United States from 1955, he did advanced space research for the army until he retired to West Germany in 1958.

Residing permanently in the town of Feucht, near Nürnberg, from 1962, Oberth spent his retirement engaged in theoretical studies. In 1959 he published Stoff und Leben (“Material and Life”). Oberth posited in this work that materialism, the philosophy on which communism is based, is incorrect and further that aspects of human life such as the soul could not be explained by material reason.