Wernher von Braun – Part 3

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Marriage in Bavaria

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Returning Home for a Bride
On 14 February 1947 Wernher von Braun boarded a ship in New York to sail to Germany in order to marry a woman he knew only casually since the two had met in Peenemünde. He also intended to bring back his parents, who were now in Landshut, Germany.

NASA Wernher von Braun

On 1 July 1960, Dr. Wernher von Braun was appointed director of the newly created Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He first came to Huntsville to develop rockets for the Redstone Arsenal there in 1950. This photo was probably taken in May 1964. PHOTO: NASA

Maria von Quistorp was 34-year-old von Braun’s first cousin and not yet 19 years old. She and von Braun had only exchanged letters since he had gone to America, but she accepted the proposal of marriage he had sent via his parents. On March 1, 1947 the two were married in a Lutheran church in Landshut, Bavaria. Constantly shadowed by American MPs, the couple had no real honeymoon, not even on the ship back to the US. (Only women had cabins; the men slept in bunk halls with returning GIs on the troop ship.)

At the end of March 1947 the von Brauns arrived by train in El Paso. With them were Wernher’s parents, Emmy and Magnus von Braun. For the next three years, von Braun would continue to work on the army’s experimental Hermes II ramjet cruise missile, a project that would later be cancelled for being too impractical. During this time and later, von Braun was critical of the US government’s failure to give rocket development a higher priority. In the end, this lost time would cost the US dearly in the space race with the Soviet Union (which also had German scientists). Had the US been more foresighted, perhaps the first orbiting satellite in 1957 would have been American and not the Russian Sputnik.

The von Braun family

The Von Braun family in the 1960s. PHOTO: NASA

In April 1950 the German engineering team headed by Wernher von Braun moved from the Texas and New Mexico desert to the humid, green, deep-South state of Alabama. With the outbreak of the Korean War in June, funding for the new Huntsville operation increased and von Braun turned to developing the secret Redstone “guided missile.” The old Hermes ramjet project was cancelled and, thanks to the Korean War, there was now a new impetus for developing improved ballistic missiles based on von Braun’s WWII V2 rocket.

But the German V2s had never achieved a target accuracy better than ten to twenty miles, while the US Army was now demanding a rocket with similar range (182 miles) to be accurate within 150 yards (137 m)! The biggest hurdle now faced by the rocket engineers in Huntsville was developing a guidance system that could achieve this much higher accuracy rate.

Von Braun was now in charge of the Guided Missile Development Division of the Ordnance Missile Laboratories. By 1954, he had 950 employees. Just four years later he would be in charge of 3,925 people. As he had earlier demonstrated in Peenemünde, one of von Braun’s main strengths was his ability to lead people and manage large, complex projects. In January 1958 a modified Jupiter C rocket developed by von Braun’s engineers launched America’s first satellite, just months after the Soviets had put Sputnik, the world’s first man-made satellite, into orbit.

The Space Spokesman

Collier’s and Walt Disney
In the mid-1950s Wernher von Braun’s name became known to all Americans, following a series of articles by Cornelius Ryan and von Braun in Collier’s magazine (circulation: 4 million) and several television shows on Walt Disney’s popular Disneyland TV series. Ryan’s first beautifully illustrated feature in Collier’s (with artwork of von Braun’s rocket design on the cover) appeared on newsstands in March 1952. It explained the complexities of future space travel and allowed von Braun to expound on his favorite topic: man in space. The now famous rocket scientist also did PR work for Collier’s, making numerous TV and personal appearances. In June 1953, another Collier’s piece written by von Braun himself described what he called a “Baby Space Station” carrying monkeys in low earth orbit as a first step in conquering space. The series ended in April 1953 with another von Braun article: “Can We Get to Mars?” The Collier’s articles and related books had a huge impact on American public opinion at a time when the print media were much more important than they are today.

Television
The Collier’s publicity also caught the attention of Walt Disney, who was then searching for something to fill the “Tomorrowland” segment of his new Disneyland TV series for ABC, based on his new California theme park (which would open in July 1955). When an earlier TV deal fell through in 1954, von Braun accepted Disney’s offer for him to participate in a series of space-travel shows, along with Willy Ley, another noted German aerospace engineer.

VIDEO: Dr. Wernher von Braun in the “Man in Space” episode of Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series, first broadcast in March 1955.

For his Disney deal, von Braun was paid $6,500 as a consultant and for his TV appearances (more than $65,000 in current dollars). The first show in the series, “Man in Space,” was broadcast on 9 March 1955. A month later von Braun and over 100 of his fellow Germans became American citizens in ceremonies in Huntsville. To the press that day von Braun said: “This is the happiest and most significant day in my life. I must say we all became American citizens in our hearts long ago…”

The Space Race

Von Braun and other scientists in the US were well aware that fellow scientists in the Soviet Union (many of them also German) were also working on ballistic missiles and space technology. For the 18-month International Geophysical Year (IGY, July 1957 to December 1958) world scientists were proposing the launch of a small scientific satellite. Secretly, the super powers also viewed satellites as the ideal way to spy on each other, without the problems of spy planes such as the U2.

Von Braun felt that the Redstone rocket, basically a bigger, more refined V2, offered a simple, low-cost way to launch a US satellite and beat the Russians. With existing Loki solid-fuel boosters on each stage, the Redstone was capable of boosting a small 10-pound satellite into earth orbit. In a 1954 report he wrote: “It would be a blow to U.S. prestige if we did not do it first.” In January 1955 the army and navy submitted their proposal for Project Orbiter to the R&D section of the office of the Secretary of Defense. Von Braun also tried to push participation by the air force, but it was reluctant to participate because it had its own satellite program. Interservice rivalry and other factors delayed von Braun’s plans, but he continued to work on them.

The Sputnik Shock
On 4 October 1957 Wernher von Braun learned that the Russians had beat the US into orbit when a reporter called him to ask what he thought about that. He wasn’t surprised, but he was disappointed “and a little bitter that we hadn’t been allowed to do it before they did.”

Even after the Russian space victory the Eisenhower administration was slow to push for the US to catch up. Von Braun was again frustrated for a while. Later he would be known as the “prophet of the space age” (Life magazine) and be responsible for the launch of the first US satellite, but it was not until after the Soviets put a second, much heavier satellite into orbit on 3 November that the US got serious about orbiting its own satellite.

Sputnik I only weighed about 185 pounds (84 kg), but Sputnik II was a half-ton capsule with a live dog aboard. (Laika was doomed to perish in space.) At one time the US had been discussing the launch of a five-pound satellite in order to be first. A satellite weighing 1,118 pounds (508 kg) meant the Russians had some very powerful rockets that could also send a weapon towards the US. Ike and others were unhappy when von Braun pointed out in an interview that one reason the US was behind was that “the United States had no ballistic missile program worth mentioning between 1945 and 1951.”

After the spectacular failure of a navy Vanguard rocket in an attempt to launch a satellite on 6 December 1957 (the fiery explosion was broadcast live on TV), von Braun got his chance. On the first day of February 1958, a modified army Jupiter-C rocket (Juno I) developed by von Braun’s team blasted off from Cape Canaveral and put Explorer I (built by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL) into earth orbit. America’s first satellite, including instrumentation, was barely over six feet in length and had a total weight of just 30.8 pounds (14 kg), but von Braun and the Huntsville engineers were now heroes.

A second satellite launch on 5 March failed. On 26 March 1958, Explorer 3 was launched and was able to confirm the existence of the Van Allen Belt that Explorer 1 had discovered.

Following its satellite success, ABMA was now running several different rocket programs. Dr. von Braun reorganized the Huntsville teams, with project managers for Pershing, Redstone, and Jupiter. Huntsville was also developing a much more powerful liquid-fuel rocket in an effort to catch up to the much higher lift capabilities of the Soviets. This new rocket would be named Saturn and would eventually be the vehicle that would put men on the moon.

The Switch to NASA

The Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC)
In 1960 von Braun ended his many years of working for the US Army when he was appointed the director of NASA’s new Marshall Space Flight Center (named for the former army general and Secretary of State George C. Marshall) in Huntsville. There he became the leader of the team that would develop the powerful Saturn V rocket that put six teams of American astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972.

Saturn V engines

Dr. Wernher von Braun stands before the five huge Rocketdyne F1 engines developed for the Saturn V rocket that took Americans to the moon. PHOTO: NASA

Von Braun only made the switch to NASA after he was assured that the MSFC mission would continue to be the development of the Saturn rocket for earth-orbit and space missions. He would remain the director of the Marshall Center for a decade, leaving Huntsville in February 1970 to take a job as NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Faced with severe budget cuts and unhappy with his new job, von Braun only stayed until 26 May 1972 when he retired from NASA to work for private industry. In the same year that the last lunar landing took place (Apollo 17), von Braun became Vice President for Engineering and Development at Fairchild Industries in Germantown, Maryland.

1970 NASA ceremonies

Dr. Wernher von Braun with his family and dignitaries at ceremonies unveiling a plaque in his honor prior to his leaving Huntsville in February 1970. Pictured: daughter Iris, wife Maria, US Senator John Sparkman, Alabama governor Albert Brewer, von Braun, son Peter, and daughter Margrit. PHOTO: NASA

In July 1973 Wernher von Braun was diagnosed with kidney cancer. In August he had his cancerous kidney removed. After recovery, he continued to work, but declining health forced him to retire from Fairchild in December 1976. He was 65 years old when he died of colon cancer in Alexandria, Virginia on 16 June 1977. His grave is in the Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria.

“A Twentieth Century Faust”*
Although everyone knew about Wernher von Braun’s work for the Nazis, during most of his career in the US the details of his Nazi past were glossed over or kept hidden from the public. The US government needed him and the other German engineers, so the less that was known, the better. Von Braun himself never revealed much about his past and, despite several revealing reports, the unpleasant details about his V2 work for the Nazis stayed out of the public spotlight.

Critics claim that, like Goethe’s Faust, von Braun sold his soul in order to get the resources and finances for his rockets and his dream of space travel. They also say that he constructed an evil weapon for the Nazis without any regard for human lives. But both the Russians and the Americans ignored the Nazi past of their “borrowed” German engineers out of patriotic fervor. And what would have happened to von Braun or anyone else who refused to work for the Nazis?

However one may judge von Braun, his genius lay in his superb management skills and his talent for running large projects. Although he was also an excellent rocket engineer, his strength was in dealing with people. The Russian Sergei Korolev (1907-1966) may have exceeded von Braun in technical achievements (first satellite, first ICBM, first object to hit the moon, first man and woman in space – first in almost everything except man on the moon), but all his work was based on the German V2. Without von Braun’s management skills, the US would probably not have landed on the moon in 1969, and in the end the Soviets were unable to keep up with that level of achievement.

*From the book Von Braun by Michael J. Neufeld

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