Word: von
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Such-&-Such a Date. Last Oct. 4, Defense Secretary-designate Neil McElroy, touring U.S. military bases before taking office, was dining in the officers' club at Huntsville when Wernher von Braun was called from the table to the telephone. Von Braun returned red-faced: he had just been told that the Russians had launched Sputnik I. Next morning Von Braun urged McElroy to put Jupiter-C into the satellite contest. During the next few weeks, McElroy received more than 100 ideas from the services for putting a U.S. satellite into space. Finally, on Nov. 8, McElroy announced his decision...
...Wernher von Braun, 45, rugged (5 ft. 11 in., 185 lbs.) son of Prussian Baron Magnus von Braun, is director of the development operations division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala., stands out as the inspirational as well as the scientific leader of the Men of Jupiter. At 18 Von Braun was working with crude liquid-fuel rockets, using Berlin's municipal dump; one day a black sedan stopped. Three German army officers stepped out, offered Von Braun military facilities to carry on his rocket work. At 20 he was chief of the entire German rocket...
...colonel with the II Corps in North Africa during World War II, later served as assistant chief of Army ordnance before being assigned to Huntsville in November 1955. At Huntsville John Medaris welded 4,000 civilians and 1,000 military people into a close-working group. Medaris and Wernher von Braun have such respect for each other that Medaris wants the Army's next missile to be named the "Wernher." By function, Medaris is middleman between the space-at-all-costs Huntsville scientists and the cost-conscious Defense Department-and if Von Braun is mainly responsible for the blueprints...
...where Pickering took his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, a doctorate in physics. During World War II he headed up the Army's investigation of Japanese incendiary balloon attacks on the West Coast. After World War II he studied guided-missile work with Caltech Aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman in Germany and Japan, decided that German work had been overestimated, Japanese work underestimated. Now at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pickering directs about 2,000 highly skilled men and women, controls a budget of some $25 million (most of it from the Army), has only one reservation about...
...maintained its leadership." West Germany's Welt am Sonntag observed that "space no longer belongs to the Soviet Union alone. America has caught up with the Soviet Sputnik lead." It added, with pardonable local pride, that the achievement was "a personal triumph for Wernher von Braun and his German colleagues...