Dr. Wernher von Braun was a German aerospace engineer born on 23 March 1912 in Wirsitz. He was the second of three sons of a noble Lutheran family. From birth, he held the title of Freiherr (equivalent to Baron), his father being a civil servant and conservative politician that served as Minister of Agriculture in the federal government during the Weimar Republic. The family moved to Berlin in 1915, where his father worked at the Ministry of the Interior. After Wernher’s Confirmation, his mother gave him a telescope, and he developed a passion for astronomy. Here in 1924, the 12-year-old Wernher, inspired by speed records established by Max Valier and Fritz von Opel in rocket-propelled Opel RAK cars, rail cars, and even the world’s first rocket plane, caused a major disruption in a crowded street by detonating a toy wagon to which he had attached fireworks. He was taken into custody by the local police until his father came to get him.
In his childhood, he attended a boarding school at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar, where he did not do well in physics and mathematics. There he acquired a copy of “Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen” (1923, By Rocket into Planetary Space) by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth, that made him study calculus and trigonometry so he could understand the physics of rocketry. From his teenage years, von Braun had held a keen interest in space flight, becoming involved in the German Society for Space Travel (VfR) in 1928, during his time at the Technische Hochschule Berlin. There he assisted Willy Ley in his liquid-fuel rocket motor tests in conjunction with Hermann Oberth. In spring 1932, he graduated with a diploma in mechanical engineering. Wanting to learn more about physics, chemistry, and astronomy, von Braun entered the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin for doctoral studies and graduated with a doctorate in physics in 1934. He also studied at ETH Zürich for a term from June to October 1931.
In 1933, von Braun was working on his creative doctorate when the Nazi Party came to power in a coalition government in Germany; rocketry was almost immediately moved onto the national agenda. An artillery captain, Walter Dornberger, arranged an Ordnance Department research grant for von Braun, who then worked next to Dornberger’s existing solid-fuel rocket test site at Kummersdorf.
Von Braun was awarded a doctorate in physics( aerospace engineering) on 27 July 1934, from the University of Berlin for a thesis entitled “About Combustion Tests”; his doctoral supervisor was Erich Schumann. However, this thesis was only the public part of von Braun’s work. His actual full thesis, Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket (dated 16 April 1934) was kept classified by the German army and was not published until 1960. By the end of 1934, his group had successfully launched two liquid fuel rockets that rose to heights of 2.2 and 3.5 km.
At the time, Germany was highly interested in American physicist Robert H. Goddard’s research. Before 1939, German scientists occasionally contacted Goddard directly with technical questions. Von Braun used Goddard’s plans from various journals and incorporated them into the building of the Aggregat (A) series of rockets. The first successful launch of an A-4 took place on 3 October 1942. The A-4 rocket would become well known as the V-2.
In 1944 Goddard confirmed his work was used by von Braun, after analyzing parts of a V2 rocket that was found in Sweden. In response to Goddard’s claims, von Braun said “at no time in Germany did I or any of my associates ever see a Goddard patent”.
There were no German rocket societies after the collapse of the VfR, and civilian rocket tests were forbidden by the new Nazi regime. Only military development was allowed, and to this end, a larger facility was erected at the village of Peenemünde in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Dornberger became the military commander at Peenemünde, with von Braun as technical director. In collaboration with the Luftwaffe, the Peenemünde group developed liquid-fuel rocket engines for aircraft and jet-assisted takeoffs. They also developed the long-range A-4 ballistic missile and the supersonic Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile. He also worked on some liquid-fuelled rocket-aircrafts and Ernst Heinkel enthusiastically supported their efforts, supplying a He-72 and later two He-112s for the experiments.
In 1945, the Soviet Army was about 160km from Peenemünde, when von Braun assembled his planning staff and asked them to decide to whom they should surrender. Unwilling to go to the Soviets, von Braun and his staff decided to try to surrender to the Americans. They were relocated to the area around Mittlewerk and resumed work in the middle of February 1945. Fearing their documents will be destroyed by the SS, von Braun ordered the blueprints to be hidden in an abandoned iron mine in the Harz mountain range near Goslar. The US Counterintelligence Corps managed to unveil the location after lengthy interrogations of von Braun, Walter Dornberger, Bernhard Tessmann and Dieter Huzel and recovered 14 tons of V-2 documents by 15 May 1945, from the British Occupation Zone.
In early April, as the Allied forces advanced deeper into Germany, Kammler ordered the engineering team, around 450 specialists, to be moved by train into the town of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps, where they were closely guarded by the SS with orders to execute the team if they were about to fall into enemy hands. However, von Braun managed to convince SS Major Kummer to order the dispersal of the group into nearby villages so that they would not be an easy target for U.S. bombers. On 29 April 1945, Oberammergau was captured by the Allied forces who seized the majority of the engineering team.
Von Braun and several members of the engineering team, including Dornberger, made it to Austria. On 2 May 1945, upon finding an American private from the U.S. 44th Infantry Division, von Braun’s brother and fellow rocket engineer, Magnus, approached the soldier on a bicycle, calling out in broken English: “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender.”
Later, in 1945, he was transferred to the US with a part of his team where he continued their rocketry experiments at Fort Bliss, near El Paso. Back in Germany, von Braun had thousands of engineers who answered to him at Peenemünde, he was now subordinate to “pimply” 26-year-old Jim Hamill, an Army major who possessed only an undergraduate degree in engineering. His loyal Germans still addressed him as “Herr Professor,” but Hamill addressed him as “Wernher” and never responded to von Braun’s request for more materials. Every proposal for new rocket ideas was dismissed. As part of the Hermes project, they helped refurbish, assemble, and launch a number of V2s that had been shipped to New Mexico.
In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, von Braun and his team were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, his home for the next 20 years. Between 1952 and 1956, von Braun led the Army’s rocket development team at Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States. He personally witnessed this historic launch and detonation. Work on the Redstone led to the development of the first high-precision inertial guidance system on the Redstone rocket. As director of the Development Operations Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, von Braun, with his team, then developed the Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone rocket.
Von Braun had a lot of ideas about space stations that will orbit around Earth, permanent lunar base or rockets that used recoverable and reusable ascent stages, as Spacex uses today. He envisioned these expeditions as very large-scale undertakings, with a total of 50 astronauts traveling in three huge spacecraft (two for crew, one primarily for cargo), each 49 m (160.76 ft) long and 33 m (108.27 ft) in diameter and driven by a rectangular array of 30 rocket propulsion engines. The German engineer also worked out preliminary concepts for a human mission to Mars that used the space station as a staging point. His initial plans, published in The Mars Project (1952), had envisaged a fleet of 10 spacecraft (each with a mass of 3,720 metric tonnes), three of them uncrewed and each carrying one 200-tone winged lander in addition to cargo, and nine crew vehicles transporting a total of 70 astronauts.
In the hope that its involvement would bring about greater public interest in the future of the space program, von Braun also began working with Walt Disney and the Disney studios as a technical director, initially for three television films about space exploration. The initial broadcast devoted to space exploration was Man in Space, which first went on air on 9 March 1955, drawing 40 million viewers.
NASA was established by law on 29 July 1958. One day later, the 50th Redstone rocket was successfully launched from Johnston Atoll in the south Pacific as part of Operation Hardtack I. Two years later, NASA opened the Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) development team led by von Braun was transferred to NASA. Here he worked in Project Mercury where he was very cautious and always asked for more testing before the Redstone could be deemed man-rated, this brought him clashes with other people involved in the program.
May 20, 1969 (Source: NASA)
The Marshall Center’s first major program was the development of Saturn rockets to carry heavy payloads into and beyond Earth orbit. From this, the Apollo program for crewed Moon flights was developed. Von Braun initially pushed for a flight engineering concept that called for an Earth orbit rendezvous technique (the approach he had argued for building his space station), but in 1962, he converted to the lunar orbit rendezvous concept that was subsequently realized. He later became the director for Apollo Applications Program and in 1970 he was assigned the post of NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning at NASA Headquarters. He retired from NASA on 26 May 1972.
Von Braun also developed the idea of a Space Camp that would train children in fields of science and space technologies, as well as help their mental development much the same way sports camps aim at improving physical development.
Wernher von Braun helped establish and promote the National Space Institute, a precursor of the present-day National Space Society, in 1975, and became its first president and chairman. When the 1975 National Medal of Science was awarded to him in early 1977, he was hospitalized, and unable to attend the White House ceremony.
He was suffering from pancreatic cancer and died on 16 June 1977 at age 65. He is buried on Valley Road at the Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia. Von Braun’s name was included in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1982.
To see the launch of a V2 rocket click here.