Modell B       

Plan your dreams well and you will be rewarded!

                      

     It is said that “Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an Orphan.” 

 

     The Spaceship is one of the most resoundingly successful ideas ever realized. In the years since its creation, it has changed the world. Ironically, it can be shown to have far less than a thousand fathers. This was one of them, and arguably, the most important.  

 

     Hermann Oberth, never heard of Tsiolkovsky and his ground breaking ideas on rockets and spaceflight. But the two men were similar in that they both began to dream of spaceflight at an early age.

 

     Born on June 25, 1894 Hermann Oberth was about 11 when he read Jules Verne and began to dream of traveling in outer space. As he grew up he studied medicine at the request of his father, but he never forgot his dreams. He enrolled in several University courses in Physics to work out his ideas.  After the end of World War I he was studying in the University of Munich and preparing for his Doctoral Thesis. Naturally he chose the subject of spaceflight using Rocketships for his thesis. Not knowing Tsiolkovsky’s success with understanding the Physics of Rockets,  Oberth, had to solve the same problems all over again.  But he did so, with extreme detail and by 1922 he was ready to present his work to the University. It was rejected.

 

     He did not give up.  He raised some money by himself and in 1923 Hermann Oberth published the landmark work "The Rocket Through Planetary Space." This book created a firestorm of interest in Germany and has been called, “the Spaceship’s Birth Certificate.”

 

 

 

     In it he described two rocket designs that were to forever influence the development of spaceships throughout the world.  The first of these was his Modell B.

 

     The Modell B was a three stage rocket whose purpose was to gather information about the upper atmosphere and the region of low Earth orbit.  Of the three stages of this rocket, the first stage, Oberth called the "helper rocket." The upper two stages were called "the alcohol rocket" and the "hydrogen rocket."

 

     Together they made up what we today consider to be the Modell B. The second stage of this pair, or hydrogen rocket, was held completely within the first stage, or alcohol rocket.  This unusual arrangement made for better aerodynamics and greatly extended the range of the Modell B.  However excellent as this performance was, it was not enough. Oberth realized he needed the third stage for the Modell B to propel it to an altitude of 18,000 ft where it would separate. Together, Oberth calculated that together they would reach a maximum altitude of 1,220 miles.

 

 

 

     Shown here is Oberth’s plan for the Modell B as outlined in his book.  As you can see there is a small drawing in the lower right hand corner of the illustration showing the Helper rocket.  Unfortunately, he did not include any details of the first stage and a realistic design drawing is not possible. What we have is an accurate design drawing of the upper two stages.

 

     The Modell B was essential for the preliminary studies necessary to develop Oberth’s larger more ambitious Moon rocket.  The performance of the Modell B however gives it a place as a historically important first step to the development of the spaceship. 

 

As designed, it would be the first rocket into outer space.