Like his fellow space enthusiasts in Russia and the United States, Hermann Oberth, a Transylvanian math teacher, had been fascinated with space flight since childhood. As a boy he too had picked up a copy of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and was so mesmerized by it that he didn't put the book down for three days.
Oberth subsequently schooled himself in mathematics, discovered Newton's third law of motion, and, as the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert Goddard had before him, concluded that a rocket was the only sensible way to leave Earth. He solidified his ideas on rocketry in a long scientific paper entitled Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen (By Rocket to Planetary Space).
Oberth divided Die Rakete into three distinct parts. The first section was filled with equations and dense discussions on the basics of rocketry. The second outlined what Oberth called his Model B rocket, a two-stage device powered by combining liquid hydrogen and oxygen. The third section described an enormous rocket, the Model E, which would be capable of carrying humans to other worlds. This chapter also addressed the problems of space flight and detailed how the ship's pilot would use periscopes to view the Earth and stars, how hooks and straps would keep the crew from floating weightless inside the ship, and how the space travelers would wear specially pressurized suits with tanks of liquid oxygen and nitrogen to provide their air supply.
Oberth hoped that his professors at the University of Heidelberg in Germany would accept Die Rakete as a doctoral thesis, but when no one would support it, Oberth gave up his scholastic hopes and published Die Rakete on his own. To his complete surprise, it sold out immediately. A second printing also sold out before the publisher could even get a third printing into the bookstores.
