The rockets... can be built so powerfully that they could be capable of carrying a man aloft.

Indeed Von Braun said of him:
In 1938 the Oberth family left Sibiu Romania for good to first settle in Austria then in Nazi Germany then in the United States and finally back to a free Germany. In 1922 Oberth's proposed doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". Oberth returned to the United States to view the launch of 61A the space shuttle Challenger launched October 30 1985.

Hermann Julius Oberth (25 June 1894 – 28 December 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and engineer.