Hermann Oberth

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Hermann Oberth bigraphy, stories - Physicists

Hermann Oberth : biography

25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989

Hermann Julius Oberth (25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics.

Later life

Oberth retired in 1962 at the age of 68. From 1965 to 1967 he was a member of the National Democratic Party, which was considered to be far right. In July 1969, Oberth returned to the United States to witness the launch of the Apollo project Saturn V rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that carried the Apollo 11 crew on the first landing mission to the Moon., at the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission

The 1973 petroleum crisis inspired Oberth to look into alternative energy sources, including a plan for a wind power station that could utilize the jet stream. However, his primary interest during his retirement years was to turn to more abstract philosophical questions. Most notable among his several books from this period is Primer For Those Who Would Govern.

Oberth returned to the United States to view the launch of 61A, the space shuttle Challenger launched October 30, 1985.

Oberth died in Nuremberg, West Germany, on 28 December 1989, just shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain that had for so long divided Germany into two countries.

Books

  • Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1929) (By Rocket into Planetary Space) (in German)
  • Ways to Spaceflight (1929)
  • The Moon Car (1959)
  • The Electric Spaceship (1960)
  • Primer for Those Who Would Govern (1987) ISBN 0-914301-06-3

Legacy

Hermann Oberth is memorialized by the Hermann Oberth Space Travel Museum in Feucht, Germany, and by the Hermann Oberth Society. The museum brings together scientists, researchers, engineers, and astronauts from the East and the West to carry on his work in rocketry and space exploration.

The Oberth effect, in which a rocket engine when traveling at high speed generates more useful energy than one traveling at low speed, is named after him.

There is also a crater on the Moon and asteroid 9253 Oberth named after him.

The science-fiction movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock mentions the Oberth-class of starships hypothetically to be in his honor. Later on, this same class of starships is mentioned in several episodes of the American TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa features Hermann Oberth as the "teacher" of the movie’s protagonist, Edward Elric. Oberth is also mentioned in the last episode of the TV series Fullmetal Alchemist. In this episode, Elric has heard of a great scientist, named "Oberth", with curious theories (The English dub explicitly states his name and research into rocketry). The last moments of the series depict Elric on board a train on his way to meet Oberth, determined to study rocketry with him.

The mecha anime series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross from the early eighties featured a type of military spacecraft used by the U.N. Spacy Earth forces called the Oberth Class Space Destroyer. A character from the series, Captain Bruno J. Global, was supposedly the first to engage another space combat vessel with this type of ship using nuclear weapons.

Early life

Oberth was born to a Transylvanian Saxon family in Sibiu (German: Hermannstadt, Hungarian: Nagyszeben), Austria-Hungary (today Romania). By his own account and that of many others, around the age of 11 years old, Oberth became fascinated with the field in which he was to make his mark through reading the writings of Jules Verne, especially From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, re-reading them to the point of memorization. Influenced by Verne’s books and ideas, 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, but he lacked then the resources to pursue his idea on any but a pencil-and-paper level.