The rocket has been known since the 13th century – initially as entertainment during fireworks, but also as a military instrument. These early models were very similar to the black powder rockets that are still fired on New Year's Eve today. However, their unreliability and unpredictability were well known, so that until the 1950s, the word "rocket" was often used as a synonym for "bomb". It was not until the 20th century that scientists and engineers began to work systematically on the "taming" of this technology.

 

Wernher von Braun was born on March 23, 1912, in the town of Wirsitz in Poznań, in today's Poland, as the son of an aristocratic family. He grew up together with two brothers, Sigismund and Magnus. In 1923 he read the book "The Rocket to the Planetary Spaces" by Herrmann Oberth. With this goal in mind, he began to deal with rocket development.

 

The lives of Max Valier, a rocket pioneer from Tyrol, and Wernher von Braun overlap in some respects in a remarkable way. Both experimented with rockets at a young age and were picked up by the police. However, both got off lightly due to the intervention of family members. While Max Valier let a rocket-powered model airplane fly in 1914 to the horror of passers-by, the 16-year-old Wernher von Braun got into a handcart equipped with rockets in 1928 and drove along Berlin's Tiergartenallee with a tail of fire. Today it is assumed that the young Wernher von Braun was influenced by Max Valier, who in 1928 was testing rocket cars together with Fritz von Opel.

 

As a student at the Technical University of Berlin, he also joined the Association for Space Shipping in 1930, which carried out high-profile rocket tests at the Berlin-Reinickendorf rocket airfield. During this time, money was scarce everywhere, and the club was dependent on the income from ticket sales. At that time, there was a fascination for rockets and for the new technology in general. Unnoticed by many, the Army Weapons Office (HWA) of the German Reichswehr was also interested in the research on the liquid rocket. While enthusiasts saw this new technology as a way to travel to celestial bodies, the HWA saw the rocket as a long-range weapon that was so new that it had not been explicitly prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. The HWA therefore tried to support the research generously on the one hand and to hide the successes achieved from the public more and more on the other. After another rocket test failed in 1932, it was decided to revoke the permission of the Association for Space Shipping to use the test site. Wernher von Braun then contacted the HWA on his own and it was agreed to continue the research with the office's measuring instruments while excluding the public. However, this led von Braun to a break with the club.

 

In 1934, Wernher von Braun wrote his doctoral thesis entitled "Constructive, Theoretical and Experimental Contributions to the Problem of the Liquid Rocket". This was classified as secret immediately after the assessment. The  title was not public until 1960. This gave Wernher von Braun a key position in the further rocket program and research rockets from this cooperation achieved thrusts of 30 kg and heights of up to 1,700 m. In 1935, the decision was made to build its own research facility for rocket technology. This is how the move from the test site in Kummersdorf to Peenemünde began. There, von Braun became technical director in 1937 and was responsible for the development of the Aggregat 3 test rocket, which led to the development of the Aggregat 4 rocket from 1939 onwards. During this time, von Braun could not have overlooked what this rocket would ultimately be used for. The army had already given him specifications on the size of the rocket, which was to make it easier to move it by rail.

On October 3, 1942, the A4 rocket flew successfully for the first time after several tests had failed spectacularly. The rocket reached a thrust of 25 t and an altitude of 85 km. Since World War II was already in full swing, the HWA tried to start mass production of the rocket as soon as possible. While von Braun had had to play off several branches of the armed forces against each other in the struggle for resources for his work, more and more strongman of the 3rd Reich were now interested in his rockets, including the SS.

Wernher von Braun had already joined the SS in 1940 but rarely wore their uniform. Throughout his life, he claimed that he had followed his path in life without caring much about politics. For him, the development of the rocket was solely important to realize the flight to the moon.

 

Rocket development is still controlled by the state in all countries as soon as it goes beyond the model scale and is often promoted by the military. Wernher von Braun developed a rocket whose payload consisted of a 1,000 kg warhead. In the 2nd World War, the A4 rocket was produced as Retaliation Weapon 2 (V2) in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Prisoners from the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen were used for the production.

When von Braun visited the production facilites on several dates, he could not have failed to notice the inhumane conditions under which the prisoners had to work. Later, von Braun tried to explain his behavior by saying that he was only responsible for development, but not for production.

However, one must also not ignore the fact that a withdrawal from the rocket program at that time, a morally correct behavior from today's point of view, would also have had serious consequences even for someone like von Braun at the time.

However, his behavior after the war and in later missile programs shows that he was often willing to use all psychological and political tools to obtain financing and permits for his projects. Even in the USA, he was still able to convince rulers of his idea of large-scale space travel, even if they only pursued short-term political goals. It was only when he lost his usefulness with the successful moon landing that he was also isolated within NASA and finally switched to the private sector.

 

When the British Air Force bombed Peenemünde in August 1943, everything was prepared to relocate rocket research. Production began in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and continued there until the last days of the war. Meanwhile, a power struggle was taking place, in which the SS tried to take over the rocket program from the army. From the summer of 1944, Wernher von Braun slowly but surely distanced himself from the Nazi regime and, together with his team, began to prepare for the end of the war. Due to the deteriorating situation, von Braun's development team was held together mainly by the rocket project and its future. As the front approached, the question arose as to where to wait for the end of the war. To protect the rocket developers from the enemy's grasp, the Nazi regime moved them further and further south until they came to Oberammergau and were housed in the barracks there. On May 2, 1945, his brother Magnus was assigned to ride his bicycle and contact the Americans. Wernher von Braun and his team were then taken over by the Americans in Reutte in Tyrol, more precisely in the Südtiroler Siedlung. After all of them had been interrogated in the barracks in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, it was decided to take them to the United States to protect them from possible kidnapping by the Soviet Union. They were taken to Ford Bliss near El Paso, where they were to assemble captured V2 rockets and launch them at the Whitesands test site.

 

As early as 1947, it became apparent that missiles in the military sector would become important for mutual deterrence in the approaching Cold War. Von Braun and his team from Peenemünde were taken to Huntsville, Alabama in 1950, where the Army reopened the previously decommissioned Redstone Arsenal as a rocket research site. Cape Canaveral in Florida was chosen as the test site because test rockets could be launched out to sea from here without danger to residents. As in Peenemünde, von Braun was given the title of Technical Director, but this time for the Guided Missiles Development Division. The first development order was to develop a nuclear-capable missile with a range of 800 km. In 1953, the first "Redstone" rocket was launched, which had emerged from this project. It was the world's first medium-range nuclear missile. The development program produced several more test rockets. The Jupiter rocket based on this work, also equipped with nuclear weapons, flew for the first time in 1957. During this time, von Braun did not only want to work on these rockets but began to place advertisements in Collier's magazine from 1952 to 1954, in which he brought the new possibilities of space travel closer to the American people. He described in detail rotating space stations, launch vehicles that were necessary for construction and supply and, of course, his biggest project, the journey to the moon. However, it was not until 1958 that NASA, a civilian space agency, was founded.

In 1957, the International Geophysical Year began, an opportunity to launch a research satellite for the first time. After Sputnik 1 was launched by the Soviet Union on November 3 and surprised the world, the United States also tried to launch a small satellite. The first attempt with a Vanguard missile of the US Navy failed. The next attempt with a Jupiter rocket then brought the Explorer 1 satellite into orbit around the Earth on January 31, 1958. Developed by James Van Allen, the satellite measured for the first time the radiation of the Van Allen belt, which is named after him. With the founding of NASA in the same year, it was determined how space travel in the United States should be organized in the future. Military space travel was assigned exclusively to the Air Force, while the Redstone Arsenal, which was operated by the Army, was renamed the George Marshall Spaceflight Center and placed under the control of Civil Spaceflight and thus NASA.

 

This cleared the way for a manned space flight program, the basic features of which had already been defined in 1959. During the Mercury project, Alan Sheppard traveled to space on behalf of the United States. A Redstone rocket was used as the launch vehicle for the Mercury capsule. After the moon was publicly announced as the goal in 1961, NASA launched the Gemini program to test space travel in detail. Wernher von Braun was not involved in the rockets for the Gemini program, but he was already working on a rocket under the title Juno 5, which would later become the Saturn 1 B rocket. This rocket outshone all other rockets with its performance data. While the Jupiter rocket had been able to bring 1,350 kg into orbit, the Saturn I B rocket could carry 16,000 kg. In order not to have to immediately develop new production machines for a rocket with a take-off weight of over 500 t and a diameter of six meters, von Braun made do with the idea of arranging a Jupiter tank and eight Redstone tanks radially for the rocket's first stage and equipping them with eight engines. The second stage was then assembled from a newly developed tank with six engines. As much as this rocket was used to test new concepts, the further development of its second stage became the most important project. This stage was later used as the third stage for the moon rocket. In 1966, the Saturn I B rocket, the first large rocket developed for civilian purposes, lifted off the pad.

 

NASA had to develop many new components for the flight to the moon. The capsule, the service module and the lunar module were completely new designs. The engines of the Saturn V rocket developed for this purpose had been unimaginable in terms of their performance data only a few years earlier. For the first stage of the Saturn V rocket, the F1 engine was manufactured by Rockedyne. It was about 8 times more powerful than the engines of the Saturn I B rocket. It burned 2,577 kg of kerosene and liquid oxygen per second. Five of these engines were mounted on the first stage. The second stage was powered by five J-2 engines. As fuel, these burned hydrogen and oxygen, which made them much more efficient. The third stage was powered by a single J-2 engine, which could be switched off and on several times during flight. The Saturn V rocket developed a thrust of 3,385 t at launch and was able to carry a payload of 125,000 kg into orbit. The Saturn V rocket practically represents the fulfillment of Wernher von Braun's life's work. If it had only gone according to his plans, it would have become a bit bigger and more efficient. Above all, however, not only 15 would have been built, but hundreds, which would have been launched into space regularly and would have helped to build a space station and assemble ships for the moon and Mars flight in space.

 

After Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon for the first time on July 20, 1969, the political situation on Earth changed. NASA had achieved its goal of beating the Soviet Union in the race to the moon. Since interest in the moon dwindled after a short time later, the successful Apollo program was even ended early. Unlike those responsible at NASA, von Braun had been thinking for a long time about what would now be possible for follow-up projects with the payload capacity of the Saturn V rocket. In a memorandum, he held out the prospect of the construction of a space station, the development of a space plane and future flights to Venus and Mars. But in view of the Vietnam War, the social unrest in the United States, and the fact that his past was repeatedly brought up, he was heard less and less. In 1970, he took up the position of NASA's planning director in Washington DC but was no longer heard in the capital either. Of his plans, only Skylab, a space station consisting of the converted third stage of a Saturn V rocket, was implemented. The space plane was also developed, but without the space station it was supposed to fly to. Instead, the shuttle was used for longer stays in low earth orbit. When von Braun saw that he could no longer do anything, he took the appropriate action and switched to the private sector. He spent his last years at Fairchild Ind. and worked on the marketing of the ATS-6 communications satellite, which was to broadcast educational programs for India. Wernher von Braun died on June 16, 1977, in Alexandria, Virginia from complications of cancer.

A few years after his departure from NASA, the research center in Huntsville was "Americanized". Criticism of his management style and his way of producing all components at one location instead of commissioning subcontractors ensured that within a very short time the remaining former German employees were forced out of their posts and replaced by Americans. In 1979, the Department of Justice set up a special office to investigate the circumstances of the takeover of the rocket scientists 34 years earlier.

 

In the model below you can see the model of an engine of the A4 rocket scale 1:12. You can clearly see the combustion chamber with the nozzle, the oxygen and fuel lines and the support structure. At the top is the turbopump and its fuel tank, which could pump fuel into the combustion chamber against the operating pressure of the engine.

 

30 m to Neptune

500 m to the next station

712 m to Pluto