A von Braun TIME cover arrived in 1958, with the engineer’s calm, coifed likeness superimposed over the flames of a missile launch. The Jupiter-C, a modified version of the Redstone, launched the United States’ first satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958 - a full year after the Soviets launched their first satellite, Sputnik 1. By 1953, his team developed America’s first ballistic missile, the Redstone, which could hurl a nuclear warhead up to 250 miles downrange. Once he was settled in the U.S., von Braun’s career took off, largely fueled by the U.S.-Soviet technological rivalry that would develop into the Space Race. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. As the Allies advanced into the heart of Germany, von Braun and his engineering team headed south to surrender to the Americans, rather than await the Red Army.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. But as fearsome as the V-2 was, it had little strategic impact and failed to turn the war in Germany’s direction. For his part, von Braun, who was apparently still interested in space travel, is said to have remarked that the rockets worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet - a line that, at best, paints him as detached from the consequences of his work. The missiles traveled so fast that victims, most of whom were civilians, often heard nothing until after they struck. The V-2 was a particularly terrifying weapon. (The project also drew the interest of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS), which briefly imprisoned von Braun as part of an attempted takeover of the program.) By the later stages of the war, when von Braun’s missiles began to rain down on London, Nazi propaganda had given them a new name: the Vengeance Weapon Two, or V-2, so named because they were intended as retribution for Allied bombings of German cities. The trial caught Hitler’s attention, and the Reich began to mass produce the rockets at a feverish pace, often using slave labor. In 1942, his group successfully tested the A-4 missile, firing the weapon nearly 60 miles into the atmosphere. With the start of World War II in 1939, von Braun came under increasing pressure to produce useful military weapons. Germany launched more than 3,000 missiles of his design against Britain and other countries, indiscriminately killing approximately 5,000 people, while as many as 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died assembling the weapons. But much of the Cold War-era coverage of von Braun downplayed the darker details of his past: before he was building rockets for America, he was building them for Hitler. in the waning days of World War II, was the public face of the American space program, as well as one of its chief architects. And all through the Space Race, von Braun, a German scientist scooped up by the U.S. The United States eventually planted a flag on the lunar surface, though without the help of any orbital reactors. Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala., uses a series of models and illustrations to explain how America will reach the moon - with the aid of an enormous nuclear-powered space station, of course. Speaking with a German accent, the then-director of development at the U.S. Sporting a gray double-breasted suit, slicked-back curls and a slide rule, rocket engineer Wernher von Braun cuts a suave, authoritative figure in Disney’s 1955 television special Man and the Moon.
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