Word: wernher
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...from the beginning," says Walter Dornberger, now technical assistant to the president of Bell Aircraft in Buffalo, "was to reach infinite space." But if Wernher von Braun had any notions about the German army's spending millions to achieve his dream of space exploration, they were quickly dispelled. Germany wanted weapons, period. The Budget Bureau would not even permit Kummersdorf to buy office equipment, and Von Braun learned early in the game the techniques of flimflamming the bureaucrats, e.g., it was a rare budget official who realized that Kummersdorf's request for funds to buy an "appliance...
...second. For Peenemünde, the third test was do or die. On Oct. 3, 1942, the A-4 soared supersonically to a history-making height of nearly 60 miles, functioned perfectly. Peenemünde's men danced and wept in their joy. Walter Dornberger turned to Wernher von Braun. "Do you realize what we accomplished today?" he asked. "Today the spaceship was born...
...Hitler's personal attention, but Hitler's blessing proved only a curse. Impossible production schedules were set for the V2, driving Von Braun to the point of resigning. Nazidom's power-grabbers began fighting for control of the weapon Hitler had approved, and in February 1944, Wernher von Braun was jailed by Heinrich Himmler's black-shirted SS because he declined to connive in putting the Peenemünde project under SS control instead of army control. Only after Dornberger convinced Hitler himself that the V-2 program would collapse immediately without Von Braun...
...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...