Oberth's assistant, Nebel, proposed to use the rocket engine developed for the film as the basis for a ' Mirak' - a Minimum Rocket - that would fly and demonstrate liquid rocket technology to the public. He fled the capital in panic when he realized that his rocket could not be made to work in time for the film's premiere on 15 October 1929.
However Oberth was a theoretician, not a practical engineer, and vastly underestimated the task. Lang turned to Oberth for technical advice, and gave Oberth funding to build and fly a working liquid propellant rocket before the film's premiere. Famed director Fritz Lang began production of the first film to realistically portray spaceflight - Die Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon). The space craze caught the attention of the Ufa film studio. Willy Ley was instrumental in publicizing the Society and editing its newsletter. The membership grew from three to 500 within the year. In June 1927 Johannes Winkler called to order in Breslau the first meeting of the world's first Society for Space Travel (Verein fuer Raumschiffahrt or VfR). To those seriously interested in reaching other planets within their lifetimes, it seemed that development of the liquid rocket engine was necessary to build space ships. But the performance of the black powder rocket was so poor that it was evident that they could never be used to reach space. Powder rockets were used to send letters from town to town, and 'rocket post' became sought after by philatelists. Quacks like Zucker capitalized on the craze by equipping large hulls with powder rockets and making outlandish performance claims. Impatient German enthusiasts such as Opel, Valier, and Tiling demonstrated everything from motorcycles to aircraft powered by existing black powder rockets. The first German rocket craze ran from 1928 to 1933. It was only necessary to develop the technology! The book made it clear to young German engineers that manned flight into outer space was achievable. Hermann Oberth's Die Rakete zu den Planetenräume ( The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space) was published at the very end of 1923. Maverick attempts at developing German innovative launch technologies by Eugen Saenger and Lutz Kayser were suppressed by other countries. But Germany was able to be involved in space exploration through European institutions, building satellites or rocket stages for European projects. Attempts to revive civilian rocketry in Germany after World War II were stopped on political grounds. After the war, that technology was transferred by German engineers taken, willingly or not, to the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. These enthusiasts, funded by Hitler's Nazi government, developed rocket technology far beyond that of other countries during World War II.
German enthusiasts laid the technical groundwork for the exploration of space in the 1920's and early 1930's.
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