Oberth was something of a prodigy. As a boy in Romania, before he’d learned any advanced mathematics, he noticed an error in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Verne has his spacefarers fired from a 275-meter-long cannon. Young Oberth calculated that this would produce 23,000 times the normal force of gravity—enough to have liquefied the main characters in chapter 26. This was both precocious intelligence and, for a future rocket scientist, quite a high level of concern for human welfare.
