29 December
1989: On 29 December 1989, Hermann Julius Oberth died.
Oberth was a German scientist who is considered to be one of the founders of modern astronautics.
During World War I he drew up a design for a long-range, liquid-propellant rocket. The German War Ministry rejected it as fantasy. In 1922, Oberth's PhD dissertation on his rocket design was rejected by the University of Heidelberg.
He gained recognition when he published it in 1923 as Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ('The Rocket into Interplanetary Space'), which explained mathematically how rockets could achieve a speed that would allow them to escape Earth's gravitational pull.
In 1931, Oberth received a Romanian patent for a liquid-propellant rocket. His first rocket was launched on 7 May 1931, near Berlin.
In the 1930s, Oberth took on a young assistant who would later become one of the leading scientists in rocketry research for the German and then the United States governments: Werhner von Braun.
They worked together again during the Second World War, developing the V2 rocket, and again after the war, in the United States at the US Army’s Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama. Three years later Professor Oberth retired and returned to Germany.
