Hermann Oberth - Legacy

Legacy

Hermann Oberth is memorialized by the Hermann Oberth Space Travel Museum in Feucht, Germany, and by the Hermann Oberth Society. The museum brings together scientists, researchers, engineers, and astronauts from the East and the West to carry on his work in rocketry and space exploration.

The Oberth effect, in which a rocket engine when traveling at high speed generates more useful energy than one at traveling at low speed, is named after him.

There is also a crater on the Moon and an asteroid named after him.

The science-fiction movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock mentions the Oberth-class of starships hypothetically to be in his honor. Later on, this same class of starships is mentioned in several episodes of the American TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa features Hermann Oberth as the "teacher" of the movie's protagonist, Edward Elric. Oberth is also mentioned in the last episode of the TV series Fullmetal Alchemist. In this episode, Elric has heard of a great scientist, named "Oberth", with curious theories (The English dub explicitly states his name and research into rocketry). The last moments of the series depict Elric on board a train on his way to meet Oberth, determined to study rocketry with him.

The mecha anime series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross from the early eighties featured a type of military spacecraft used by the U.N. Spacy Earth forces called the Oberth Class Space Destroyer. A character from the series, Captain Bruno J. Global, was supposedly the first to engage another space combat vessel with this type of ship using nuclear weapons.