Hermann Oberth (25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989) was a German physicist and engineer. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics.
Oberth was born to a Transylvanian Saxon family in Sibiu, 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 1938, the Oberth family left Sibiu, Romania, for good, to first settle in Austria, then in Nazi Germany, then in the United States, and finally back to a free Germany. Oberth himself moved on first to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, Austria, then to the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany. (A Technische Hochschule at that time was a technical college offering advanced professional training in selected fields, rather than an institution also engaged in basic research, as a university.) Oberth moved to Peenemünde, Germany, in 1941 to work on Nazi German rocketry projects, including the V-2 rocket weapon, and in about September 1943, he was awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz I Klasse mit Schwertern (War Merit Cross 1st Class, with Swords) for his "outstanding, courageous behavior ... during the attack" on Peenemünde by Operation Hydra, part of Operation Crossbow.
Oberth eventually came to work for his former student, Wernher von Braun, who was developing space rockets for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama. Among other things, Oberth was involved in writing the study, The Development of Space Technology in the Next Ten Years. In 1958, Oberth was back in Feucht, Germany, where he published his ideas on a lunar exploration vehicle, a "lunar catapult", and on "muffled" helicopters and airplanes. In 1960, back in the United States again, Oberth went to work for the Convair Corporation as a technical consultant on the Atlas rocket program.
