Wernher von Braun

March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977

German-American rocket engineer who built the V-2 for Nazi Germany and later the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo program.

Biography

Wernher von Braun was born on 23 March 1912 in Wirsitz, in the Prussian province of Posen, into an aristocratic family; his father later served as agriculture minister in the Weimar Republic. A telescope from his mother and Hermann Oberth's book on rockets to interplanetary space drew him to rocketry as a teenager. He joined the amateur Spaceflight Society while studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin, graduating in 1932, and earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin in 1934.

He went on to work on rockets for the German Army, and by 1937 he was technical director of the new army rocket centre at Peenemünde. He joined the Nazi Party that year and later the SS. At Peenemünde his team developed the V-2 ballistic missile, which in 1944 became the first man-made object to reach space; it was built partly with concentration camp labour, and more people died producing it than were killed by it as a weapon. Von Braun later admitted visiting the Mittelwerk factory many times, and his role there has led to lasting criticism that he escaped accountability.

At the end of the war he and his team surrendered to the Americans and were taken to the United States under Operation Paperclip, first to Fort Bliss in Texas and later to Huntsville, Alabama, where they built missiles for the US Army. His team's Jupiter-C rocket launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite, in January 1958, and he popularised space travel in television films made with Walt Disney.

In 1960 his group moved to NASA, and he became the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, where he led development of the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon. He left Huntsville in 1970 for a planning post at NASA headquarters, retired from NASA in 1972 and became a vice president at Fairchild Industries until ill health forced him to stop at the end of 1976. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and died in Alexandria, Virginia, on 16 June 1977.