In the 1920s, Fritz Lang, the "high priest" of the German silent cinema, came across a short scholarly book called Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen (By Rocket to Planetary Space) that had inexplicably captured the public's imagination. The book had been written by Hermann Oberth, a Transylvanian math teacher who was one of the three fathers of modern rocketry.
When Lang read the book, he didn't see a technical treatise on rockets, but a mythic adventure about traveling to other worlds. He was inspired and wrote a screenplay with his wife, Thea von Harbou, for an epic space opera entitled Die Frau Im Mond (The Woman in the Moon). Lang then went about the business of making a "blockbuster" movie.
Despite their often fantastic settings, Fritz Lang's films were legendary for their realism. The massive sets of his science fiction classic Metropolis had been unlike anything seen before, and he meant to bring this same realism to his production of Frau Im Mond. To do so, every detail must be perfect. He would need an expert who appreciated complex technology and understood rocket flight. Lang recruited Hermann Oberth as a scientific advisor on the film and asked him to build an authentic model of the ship that would carry the film's fated crew to its lunar destination.
After scientific advisor Oberth and another rocket enthusiast, Willy Ley, agreed in late 1928 to work with director Fritz Lang, plans escalated. The filmmaker and the two experts decided to build a working rocket as a publicity stunt to coincide with the film's premiere on October 15, 1929. Oberth and Ley couldn't meet this impossible deadline, but the model spaceship they built looked spectacular and the film was a popular success.
