I am embarrassed to admit that I must correct my error in misnaming a well known rocket engineer.
It is the name of Hermann Oberth, who did spend several years in Huntsville, Alabama when both he and I were there employed at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). You may recall that Hermann Oberth was an early mentor of von Braun, but in Huntsville, he worked (very freely) under the "loose" supervision of von Braun. Dr. Oberth walked the halls in silent thought, mostly (I believe) because his knowledge of spoken English was limited. The technical collaborations of Oberth with von Braun, before the definition of SI in 1960, were all done in that nasty mix of cgs and metric-gravitational units, to the best of my knowledge. Interesting facts about the international career of Hermann Oberth can be found by a search of the Internet. Eugene Mechtly
