Wernher von Braun

Von Braun was born into Prussian aristocracy in 1912 — his mother's line was said, by family tradition, to run back to Edward III of England — and received a telescope at his confirmation and a copy of Hermann Oberth's rocket theory soon after. Both stuck. In 1928, still in secondary school, he joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, Germany's spaceflight society. He studied mechanical engineering in Berlin, then wrote a 1934 physics doctorate on liquid-fuel rocket construction that the German army classified and kept from public view for years. He learned piano and cello well enough to consider composing for a living, and once broke his arm and shoulder so badly in a car crash that the bones had to be rebroken and reset a month later.

To keep the army's rocket program funded, von Braun joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1940, reaching the rank of major. As technical director at Peenemünde he built the A-4, renamed the V-2 for propaganda purposes, which on June 20, 1944 became the first object built by humans to reach space — before it started falling on London and Antwerp. The Gestapo arrested him in March 1944 on suspicion of disloyalty; Albert Speer talked Hitler into releasing him two weeks later. In May 1945, with Soviet forces closing in, he arranged his team's surrender to the Americans instead. Brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip, he built the rocket that launched America's first satellite in 1958, then directed NASA's Marshall center and designed the Saturn V that carried Apollo 11 to the Moon in 1969.

The V-2 was built at Mittelwerk, an underground factory worked by prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora camp, where roughly 20,000 people died of starvation, disease, hanging, or beating — more than the finished rocket ever killed in London. Von Braun visited the plant, by his own account, on many occasions, called the conditions repulsive, and said he never personally witnessed a killing, though he acknowledged knowing by 1944 that deaths had occurred. Former prisoners gave conflicting testimony: one accused him of ordering a flogging, another of standing near a hanging without protest; historians have flagged both accounts as possibly a case of mistaken identity, and no surviving document ties him directly to an order for a death. He said afterward that he had felt helpless to change any of it. A colleague believed open protest would have gotten him executed.

NASA let him go in 1972 amid shrinking budgets; kidney cancer, diagnosed the following year, spread to his pancreas, and he died in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 16, 1977, too sick by then to collect the National Medal of Science in person. He is buried under a line from the nineteenth Psalm. Huntsville named its civic arena for him, and NASA still calls him the chief architect of the Moon program. But the Cold War usefulness that won him a NASA directorship instead of a war-crimes docket has never stopped being argued over, and a German high school that carried his name dropped it in 2014 after a Holocaust survivor publicly objected.

Wernher von Braun's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A-4 / V-2 rocket invention
  The first human-built object to reach space, and a weapon aimed at London 1942
• Disney's Man in Space television
  Brought space travel to a mass television audience 1955
• Explorer 1 / Jupiter-C invention
  America's answer to Sputnik 1958
• Marshall Space Flight Center company
  He directed it for a decade 1960
• Saturn V rocket invention
  Still the most powerful rocket ever to fly a successful mission 1967

• 1928 aged ~16 Joins the Verein für Raumschiffahrt spaceflight society while still in school
• 1934 aged ~22 Earns a doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin The dissertation, on liquid-fuel rocket engines, was classified by the army for years.
• November 12, 1937 aged 25 Joins the Nazi Party
• March 14, 1944 aged 31 Arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of disloyalty Released after two weeks through Albert Speer's intervention.
• June 20, 1944 aged 32 The A-4 rocket becomes the first human-built object to reach space
• May 2, 1945 aged 33 Surrenders his team to American forces as the Soviets advance
• January 31, 1958 aged 45 His Jupiter-C rocket launches Explorer 1, America's first satellite
• July 16, 1969 aged 57 His Saturn V rocket launches Apollo 11 toward the Moon
• June 16, 1977 aged 65 Dies of pancreatic cancer in Alexandria, Virginia

• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. flew his rocket to the Moon
• Buzz Aldrin b. 1930
  Apollo 11 lunar module pilot and second person to walk on the Moon. flew Apollo 11 with
• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. committed the nation to his goal
• Walt Disney 1901–1966
  Animator and business magnate who created Mickey Mouse and built the world's largest entertainment empire. collaborated on television