Hermann Julius Oberth was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and rocket pioneer of Transylvanian Saxon descent. He is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert H. Goddard and Herman Potočnik. Oberth supported Nazi Germany's war effort and received the War Merit Cross in 1943.
Oberth in the 1950s
Hermann Oberth as a young boy, c. 1901
Opel RAK.1 - World's first public flight of a manned rocket-powered plane on September 30, 1929
Oberth's Model B design for a two stage rocket.
A rocket is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using the surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely from propellant carried within the vehicle; therefore a rocket can fly in the vacuum of space. Rockets work more efficiently in a vacuum and incur a loss of thrust due to the opposing pressure of the atmosphere.
A Soyuz-FG rocket launches from "Gagarin's Start" (Site 1/5), Baikonur Cosmodrome
Rocket arrows depicted in the Huolongjing: "fire arrow", "dragon-shaped arrow frame", and a "complete fire arrow"
Mysorean rockets and rocket artillery used to defeat an East India Company battalion during the Battle of Guntur
William Congreve at the bombardment of Copenhagen (1807) during the Napoleonic Wars
