Hermann Oberth

As a young boy, Hermann became interested in space and rocketry after reading the work of Jules Verne. Before adulthood, he would conceive of a multistage rocket, but it was purely theoretical. In 1919, he began to study physics and wrote a dissertation by 1922 titled By Rocket into Planetary Space and later expanded it into a 429 page volume Ways to Spaceflight which was published in 1929. His dissertation was rejected because it was deemed utopian, but he was granted his doctorate in 1923. In 1928 & 1929, Oberth worked on a film about space The Woman in the Moon. For the film, he designed and constructed a rocket which was launched before the premiere of the movie and also the main rocket in the film. Oberth fired his first liquid fueled rocket motor in 1929, but he did little with rockets until he began to work for Nazi Germany when he worked on the V-2 rockets. The rest of his work on rockets was limited, but he continued to write about space. In 1953, he wrote Man in Space. Then, in 1958, Oberth began to work in the United States for his former student, Wernher von Braun on rockets for NASA. Oberth finally retired in 1962, but he lived until 1989. Hermann Oberth is considered to be the last of the fathers of rocketry.