Word: braun
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Says Germany's veteran Rocketeer Rolf Engel, who has known Von Braun since 1928: "He is a human leader whose eyes and thoughts have always been turned toward the stars. It would be foolish to assign rocketry success to one person totally. Components must necessarily be the work of many minds; so must successive stages of development. But because Wernher von Braun joins technical ability, passionate optimism, immense experience and uncanny organizing ability in the elusive power to create a team, he is the greatest human element behind today's rocketry success...
Mother Knew Best. Von Braun's origins had deep earthly roots in Prussian Junkerdom. A Von Braun fought the Mongols at Liegnitz in 1245, and the family's aristocracy was certified by the centuries. Wernher was born in Wirsitz, East Prussia (now part of Poland), the middle son of Baron Magnus von Braun, the local state administrator. Today Wernher's older brother, Sigismund, is counselor at the German embassy in London; his younger brother, Magnus, is program-control manager of the Chrysler Corp.'s new missile division in Detroit. Last week in a comfortable Oberaudorf apartment...
Unquestionably, much of it came from Wernher's mother, an enthusiastic amateur astronomer ("Odd," says Wernher von Braun, "but few mothers are"), who pointed out to him the planets and constellations in Prussia's clear night skies. "For my confirmation," says Wernher von Braun, "I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift...
Blood on the Walls. Reading an astronomy pamphlet in the mid-1920s Von Braun saw a drawing of a rocket streaking through space to the moon. It illustrated an article about Pioneer Rocket Theorist Hermann Oberth, now 63 and a consultant to Von Braun's Huntsville team, which venerates him as "The Old Gentleman." Von Braun sent away for a copy of Oberth's classic book, The Rocket to the Interplanetary Spaces, was shocked to discover that it contained mostly mathematical equations. Until then, Von Braun had disliked math, and indeed had flunked it in school. "But," says...
Rocketeer Oberth's work had inspired many another young German rocket bug, most of them flirting dangerously with destruction as they pursued their untried hobby. Von Braun joined a small group firing rockets from an abandoned ammunition dump in suburban Berlin. When he left for a term at Zurich's Institute of Technology, he continued his experiments, built a contraption that spun mice in simulation of rocket takeoffs. Afterward, his roommate, an American medical student, dissected the mice, announced to Von Braun that the high acceleration caused cerebral hemorrhages. Their landlady had another kind of announcement: any more...