Even though the age of space travel and exploration has been with mankind for a relatively short period of time, the foresight and genius of Professor Hermann Oberth championed this avenue of adventure many years before space flight became a reality. Professor Hermann Oberth received his initial stimulus toward astronautics by reading the great science fiction writers of the 19th century. Even though he found school lacking in challenge, he delved deep into science. For his Doctoral degree at Heidelberg University, he produced a comprehensive thesis on rocket development. It was rejected as farfetched, but his dissertation became the now celebrated book "The Rocket into Planetary Space," published in 1923. In this dissertation, he recognized and proposed solutions to a very wide spectrum of rocketry and space travel problems. He addressed enormous fuel consumption, the hazards of solid propellants, handling of volatile fuels, and the effects upon the human body, doing all this some 40 years before the first space flight. Like his proposals for rocket weapons in 1917, his plans for space flight in 1922 fell on deaf ears, forcing his return to teaching and research. It was his theories and writings which were to become a leading inspiration to the German rocket scientists of the 1930s and 1940s, and into the dawn of space flight in the 1960s, when his pioneering genius in this discipline was at last accepted. This legendary pioneer figure of astronautics, after over six decades as an advocate of space travel, remained active in writing and consulting on exploration of the Universe, charting the course of future space conquest.
Inducted in 1980.
Portrait Location: Space Gallery