Menschen Im Weltraum.

An introduction by Dr. Wilhelm Meyer-Cords (Düsseldorf, December 1954) traces Oberth’s career from his 1923 Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen through his 1929 Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (also in this collection) to the Bumper-WAC rocket’s 403 km flight of February 1949, and cites Heinz Gartmann’s Oberth biography Träumer, Forscher, Konstrukteure — Gartmann, also represented in this collection, later wrote the foreword to Oberth’s The Moon Car (also here).

Across eight chapters Oberth surveys satellite rockets, including an unmanned three-stage design he proposes for carrying rhesus monkeys on a 60-day orbital research flight; types of space stations; a wire-mesh space mirror (Weltraumspiegel) for redirecting sunlight to Earth; electric spacecraft; and, in Chapter 7, the jumping, compressed-air-legged “Mondauto” that Oberth expanded five years later into the standalone The Moon Car. From the library of Heyward E. Canney, Jr., represented elsewhere in the collection.