Word: brauns
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...Dignified?" Once it had them, the U.S. hardly knew what to do with the German rocketeers. The world was again at peace, and no Congressman in his right mind would appropriate money for missilery or for Von Braun's dream of space exploration. Von Braun and his men, lonely and discouraged, were set down at Fort Bliss, Texas, left to tinker around, pretty much by themselves, with old V-25, moved no closer to space. The Korean war changed that: in 1950 the German scientists were rushed bag and baggage to Huntsville (see box) with orders to build...
...first time, Wernher von Braun's reach for the stars was accepted as more science than science fiction. In the summer of 1954 Von Braun and a dozen other space enthusiasts from the services and industry gathered in the Washington office of Lieut. Commander George Hoover, U.S.N., to talk about launching a satellite. Von Braun proposed to slam a 5-lb. chunk of metal into orbit with the brute force of a souped-up Redstone; the Office of Naval Research kicked in $88,000 for work on an instrumented satellite, and Project Orbiter was born. It was shortlived...
Wernher von Braun and his rocket team, the world's most experienced, were specifically ordered to forget about satellite work. They did no such thing, and neither did their U.S. Army bosses. The Von Braun team had been authorized to develop the Army's Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile as a competitor of the Air Force's Thor-and Von Braun said he needed test vehicles to iron out some of the problems. He wangled permission to build twelve Jupiter-Cs-actually, almost the same jazzed-up Redstones with which he had proposed to put a small...
...Sept. 20, 1956, the first Jupiter-C was ready for firing at Cape Canaveral. It was a four-stage missile, with even a dummy fourth-stage satellite configuration-just like the bird that last fortnight put Explorer into orbit. By this time, Pentagon brass had a notion that Von Braun might be trying to beat the Navy into space with an unauthorized-and presumably undignified-major satellite. The Army, which had had the foresight to bring Von Braun and his team to the U.S. in the first place, and which had supported him all along in the face of awesome...
General Medaris therefore had no choice but to call Von Braun. "Wernher," said he, "I must put you under direct orders personally to inspect that fourth stage to make sure it is not live." Without a satellite, Jupiter-C flew 3,300 miles-farther than any U.S. missile before or since. Wernher von Braun knew then that he could surely launch a satellite-if given the chance...