Word: wernher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Shirtsleeved, tousled, and bright-eyed with the dream that gave Germany its V-2 and the U.S. its first orbiting satellite, bull-shouldered Wernher von Braun paced the yellow-walled office in Building 4488, nerve center of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala. Already on his cluttered mahogany desk last week was a new satellite assignment: preparing a Jupiter-C to power Explorer II into space late this month. More work was on the way; called by the telecommunications room, Space Engineer von Braun hurried down the hall, talked to Defense Department Missile Director William Holaday in Washington...
...hard-working servicemen and civilian specialists along the whole broad front of U.S. missilery felt a new nearness to space as Explorer radioed back its readings (see SCIENCE). And of the legions of scientists, generals, admirals, engineers and administrators at work on missiles and man-made moons, German-born Wernher von Braun, 45, best personified man's accelerating drive to rise above the planet. Von Braun, in fact, has only one interest: the conquest of space, which he calls man's greatest venture. To pursue his lifelong dream, he has helped Adolf Hitler wage a vengeful new kind...
...rocketry has become too conservative, e.g., a West Coast rocketeer says that Von Braun is wary of unproved new ideas, no matter how promising, and that he "still takes the conventional view that we should go into space with chemical rockets, with overgrown missiles of conventional design." To this, Wernher von Braun pleads guilty. "The more you're in this business," he says, "the more conservative you get. I've been in it long enough to be very conservative, to want to improve what we've got rather than begin by building what we haven...
...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...
Died. Ernst Heinkel, 70. German airplane pioneer, designer (with a propulsion unit developed by Wernher von Braun) of the world's first (in 1939) rocket plane (the He 176) and jet-propelled aircraft (the He 178), a shrewd mastermind of Luftwaffe production whose farseeing predictions and plans were thumbed down by Hitler and Goring; of a cerebral hemorrhage; in Stuttgart, West Germany. Denazified in 1949, Heinkel made motor scooters and midget cars, recently announced plans to go back into big-time planemaking with Willi Messerschmitt...