H.J. Oberth, 95; Rocketry Pioneer

Hermann Julius Oberth, recognized with Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky as one of the three great pioneers of modern rocketry and mentor to Werhner von Braun, who developed both Germany’s V-2 rocket and the U.S. space program, died Friday. He was 95.

Oberth was the last scientific survivor of the handful of men who transformed the literary fantasies of Jules Verne into the routines of modern space exploration. He died at a hospital in Nuremberg after a short illness, according to a statement from the Hermann Oberth Museum in nearby Feucht.

(Tsiolkovsky, a Russian who worked out early theories of rocket propulsion, died in 1935 and Goddard, an American who experimented with primitive rocketry, died in 1945. Thus Oberth was the only one who lived to see space travel.)

Oberth was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He was an amateur physicist and mathematician in the early 1920s and studied medicine, aerodynamics and physics at universities in Munich, Goettingen and Heidelberg.

Oberth was unaware of the work of Tsiolkovsky or Goddard when he first began his experiments. In 1930, he began working on a conical jet motor for the German government and developed a model later that year. By then he had become famous in scientific ranks and Von Braun came to learn from him.

Oberth was born near Nuremberg. At age 15, he built a small model of a rocket motor described in Verne’s science fiction book “From the Earth to the Moon.”

He submitted a thesis on rocket experiments for his doctorate, which was turned down as too cursory. An expanded version was published in 1923 as the book “The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space,” which showed mathematically that it was possible to escape Earth’s gravity. He not only worked out his spaceship’s propulsion system and architectural form--even down to the rocket engine’s nozzles--he designed spacesuits and methods of eating in weightless conditions.

His findings were turned over to the German government but dismissed as “fantasy.”

Another publication of his work in 1929, “The Way to Spaceship Travel,” is today seen as a pioneering work in rocket research.

The same year, Oberth lost the sight in his left eye in an experiment while working as an adviser to German director Fritz Lang on his film “Woman on the Moon.”

Among his pioneering concepts were sending a telescope into space because of its advantage over ground-based explorations of the universe; the possibility of astronauts walking in space and space stations in Earth orbit as jumping-off points for interplanetary travel. He also worked out the physics of joining two spacecraft in orbit, a procedure now called docking.

Oberth joined Von Braun in rocket experiments in the United States in 1955, but he retired three years later and returned to live in West Germany. Von Braun, who died in 1977, was considered the leading scientist in U.S. space flight development.

Oberth paid one of his last visits to the United States in October, 1985, when he watched a space shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral.

In an interview with the Washington Post that year, Oberth said when he first started writing of space he thought it would only be a decade or so before space travel might be possible.

“It has proven to be much more complicated than I thought,” he said, but added: “Events have proven me right. One has to be an optimist.”

There were no immediate details about survivors or funeral arrangements.