Word: oberth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...worked out the basic principles of rocket dynamics. America's Robert Hutchings Goddard (right) launched the world's first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926 and patented 214 devices and parts, most of them essential to the operation of modern rocket engines. Germany's Hermann Oberth (center) popularized the idea of space travel as a real possibility in his 1923 bestseller The Rocket into Planetary Space, and his writing helped inspire Germany to early prominence in the field...
Tsiolkovsky and Goddard are dead. Oberth, now 75 and living quietly near Nürnberg on a meager pension, has mixed feelings now that his lifelong dream is about to come true. "Sometimes I feel like an unmusical person who attends a concert and doesn't really understand what seems to excite everybody," he says. "On other occasions I feel like a mother goose who has hatched a brood and now, somewhat perplexed, watches the flock going off into the water. It is only very rarely that I have the satisfaction that everybody believes I ought to feel...
Soon, European amateurs and scientists alike were also experimenting with rockets, most of them inspired by The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, a booklet published in 1923 by Rumanian Professor Hermann Oberth. German rocketeers eventually constructed a liquid-fuel rocket strikingly similar to Goddard's. By 1942, under the direction of Walter Dornberger and Wernher Von Braun, it had evolved into the dread V2, the first space-age rocket. After the successful test-firing of the V2, Dornberger turned to Von Braun and shouted exultantly: "Do you realize what we accomplished today? Today the spaceship was born...
...winning the award, Whipple joins such previous recipients as Wernher Von Braun (1957), Hermann Oberth (1955), and James A. Van Allen...