Eugene
Cagle, NASA's engineering manager for the Saturn rocket program,
regarded the role of Wernher von Braun in the American space program
as crucial:
“(Von Braun) was the main player in
all the work that went on. We might have been successful (without
him), but not in the '60s. He was a great leader.” (V.
Whitman, Times
Daily,
20 July 1999)
How
strange it is, then, that on the fiftieth anniversary of the first
landing of Americans on the Moon, we have heard so much about the
astronauts but very little about Wernher von Braun and his team of
rocket-scientists from Germany – and that what we do hear about the
German rocket-scientists today is largely negative.
Cagle's
assessment is clearly correct. In the early 1950s the United States
had two rocket programs, one run by the Army, which had the Germans,
and one run by the Navy, which was plagued with failures. When the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration was formed, it was
built mainly around the team of Germans brought to the United States
after the Second World War. We can safely conclude, therefore, that
without Wernher von Braun and his team, there would have been many
more failed rockets, and perhaps there would never have been a NASA.
As with
some other big ideas, the idea of traveling to the Moon was a German
elaboration of a French inspiration. Jules Verne's novel of 1865, De
la Terre à la Lune,
contained insights like the fact that Florida would be a good
location for launches, but it was Hermann Oberth in the early 20th
century who made the physical calculations of how acceleration out of
the Earth's gravitational pull and into outer space might be
possible. Fritz Lang's movie about a voyage to the Moon, die
Frau im Mond (1921), and
Oberth's book die Rakete in
den Planetenräumen
(1923), inspired a schoolboy named Wernher von Braun to learn the
mathematics and the physics involved so that he himself might one day
travel into outer space.
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