SPACE: Reach for the Stars

Shirtsleeved, tousled, and bright-eyed with the dream that gave Germany its V-2 and the U.S. its first orbiting satellite, bull-shouldered Wernher von Braun paced the yellow-walled office in Building 4488, nerve center of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala. Already on his cluttered mahogany desk last week was a new satellite assignment: preparing a Jupiter-C to power Explorer II into space late this month. More work was on the way; called by the telecommunications room, Space Engineer von Braun hurried down the hall, talked to Defense Department Missile Director William Holaday in Washington, turned to an aide with the heady news that two more Huntsville rocket projects had been approved (“O.K. on No. 8 and No. 10”). Back in his office, Von Braun flopped into a chair behind a huge pile of congratulatory messages, found just a moment to reflect on the fantastic rush of events. “Oh, to be in space this week,” he grinned. “It’s so quiet up there.”

It was anything but quiet on Planet Earth. Under the impetus of the satellite Explorer’s fiery success came the first federal space agency, the Senate’s first space committee, the first Democratic and Republican attempts to stake political claims on space—and a full-throttle U.S. Army drive to exploit its satellite success after months of telling itself that it was the Pentagon’s stepchild. Army brass marched with a color guard into a Capitol Hill hearing room to present a new service flag to the House Military Appropriations Subcommittee. Patrols of Army public-relations officers prowled Pentagon corridors, passing out word that, given the chance, the Army could develop a rocket motor to put a 15-ton satellite into space with a man aboard. The Air Force stood that sort of talk as long as it could, then leaked a story about using its Thor intermediate-range ballistic missile to put up a 1,000-lb. satellite as early as June. The Army promptly upped the ante to 1,500 Ibs.—and the Pentagon’s interservice storm signals were flapping furiously.

A Broomstick Would Do. Yet for all the rivalry, hard-working servicemen and civilian specialists along the whole broad front of U.S. missilery felt a new nearness to space as Explorer radioed back its readings (see SCIENCE). And of the legions of scientists, generals, admirals, engineers and administrators at work on missiles and man-made moons, German-born Wernher von Braun, 45, best personified man’s accelerating drive to rise above the planet. Von Braun, in fact, has only one interest: the conquest of space, which he calls man’s greatest venture. To pursue his lifelong dream, he has helped Adolf Hitler wage a vengeful new kind of war, has argued against bureaucracy in two languages and campaigned against official apathy and public disbelief on two continents through most of his adult years.

A robust (5 ft. 11 in., 185 Ibs.), hearty man with a booming laugh and a frank manner, he can be both ruthless and devious in his striving for space. To some, Von Braun’s transfer of loyalty from Nazi Germany to the U.S. seemed to come too fast, too easy. Von Braun’s critics say he is more salesman than scientist; actually, he learned through the bitterest experience that his space dreams had to be sold (“I have to be a two-headed monster-scientist and public-relations man”). Others claim that the onetime boy wonder of rocketry has become too conservative, e.g., a West Coast rocketeer says that Von Braun is wary of unproved new ideas, no matter how promising, and that he “still takes the conventional view that we should go into space with chemical rockets, with overgrown missiles of conventional design.” To this, Wernher von Braun pleads guilty. “The more you’re in this business,” he says, “the more conservative you get. I’ve been in it long enough to be very conservative, to want to improve what we’ve got rather than begin by building what we haven’t.” So long as the frontiers of space are broken, Wernher von Braun does not care how; he would happily ride a broomstick into the heavens.

Says Germany’s veteran Rocketeer Rolf Engel, who has known Von Braun since 1928: “He is a human leader whose eyes and thoughts have always been turned toward the stars. It would be foolish to assign rocketry success to one person totally. Components must necessarily be the work of many minds; so must successive stages of development. But because Wernher von Braun joins technical ability, passionate optimism, immense experience and uncanny organizing ability in the elusive power to create a team, he is the greatest human element behind today’s rocketry success.”

Mother Knew Best. Von Braun’s origins had deep earthly roots in Prussian Junkerdom. A Von Braun fought the Mongols at Liegnitz in 1245, and the family’s aristocracy was certified by the centuries. Wernher was born in Wirsitz, East Prussia (now part of Poland), the middle son of Baron Magnus von Braun, the local state administrator. Today Wernher’s older brother, Sigismund, is counselor at the German embassy in London; his younger brother, Magnus, is program-control manager of the Chrysler Corp.’s new missile division in Detroit. Last week in a comfortable Oberaudorf apartment, Baron Magnus von Braun, tanned and vigorous, celebrated his 80th birthday, marked by a four-page letter from Wernher and a gift of twelve bottles of Rhine wine. Said he, fingering his white walrus mustache in wonderment—now mixed with pride—at his son’s strange fascination with space: “I don’t know where his talent comes from.”

Unquestionably, much of it came from Wernher’s mother, an enthusiastic amateur astronomer (“Odd,” says Wernher von Braun, “but few mothers are”), who pointed out to him the planets and constellations in Prussia’s clear night skies. “For my confirmation,” says Wernher von Braun, “I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.”

Blood on the Walls. Reading an astronomy pamphlet in the mid-1920s Von Braun saw a drawing of a rocket streaking through space to the moon. It illustrated an article about Pioneer Rocket Theorist Hermann Oberth, now 63 and a consultant to Von Braun’s Huntsville team, which venerates him as “The Old Gentleman.” Von Braun sent away for a copy of Oberth’s classic book, The Rocket to the Interplanetary Spaces, was shocked to discover that it contained mostly mathematical equations. Until then, Von Braun had disliked math, and indeed had flunked it in school. “But,” says Von Braun, “I decided that if I had to know about math to learn about space travel and rocketry, then I’d have to learn math.” He did just that, wound up teaching physics and math to his fellow students at a boarding school on an island in the North Sea when the teacher fell ill.

Rocketeer Oberth’s work had inspired many another young German rocket bug, most of them flirting dangerously with destruction as they pursued their untried hobby. Von Braun joined a small group firing rockets from an abandoned ammunition dump in suburban Berlin. When he left for a term at Zurich’s Institute of Technology, he continued his experiments, built a contraption that spun mice in simulation of rocket takeoffs. Afterward, his roommate, an American medical student, dissected the mice, announced to Von Braun that the high acceleration caused cerebral hemorrhages. Their landlady had another kind of announcement: any more mouse blood on her walls, and the young scientists would go out on their ears.

Techniques of Flimflam. Von Braun returned in 1931 to his little Berlin group, joyously helped launch 85 primitive rockets. As it happened, the German army was then looking for some sort of long-range weapons not banned by the Versailles Treaty—and it seemed just barely possible that rockets might be the answer. Captain Walter Dornberger, a boss of the embryonic program, watched some of Von Braun’s rocket shoots and was impressed “by the energy and shrewdness with which this tall, fair young student with the broad, massive chin went to work, and by his astonishing theoretical knowledge.” Result: in October 1932, Wernher von Braun, at 20, became the top civilian specialist for the German army’s new (and only) rocket station at Kummersdorf, hidden in a pine forest south of Berlin.

“Our aim 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 for milling wooden dowels up to 10 millimeters in diameter” meant that the rocketmen needed a pencil sharpener. Years later, during the darkest days of the U.S. Army’s missile program, Wernher von Braun was to put such Kummersdorf experience to historic use.

Despite its difficulties, by 1935 the Kummersdorf group had successfully fired two liquid-fuel rockets, christened Max and Moritz (the German cartoon equivalents of the Katzenjammer Kids), and had outgrown the Kummersdorf facilities, moved on to a new range at desolate, marshy Peenemünde, on the Baltic Coast.

Adolf’s Attention. At Peenemünde with its 250-mile rocket range, Germany’s missiles went higher and higher, building steps into space. That was fine for Von Braun—but it was not yet the sort of military hardware that Germany wanted. World War II put on the pressure: Peenemünde must either produce a devastating military weapon or get out of business. Peenemünde’s answer was the A-4 (standing for Aggregate-4, but later named V2, for Vengeance Weapon Two, by Hitler’s gang). Its first test was a dismal flop. So was the 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.”

The success ultimately won 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 was Von Braun released. By that time he had begun to like his jail. “I had plenty of time to think,” says he, “and it was so quiet there.”

U.S. Attention. Von Braun returned to Peenemünde to rain V-2 ruin on London (when the first V-2 smashed London, Spaceman von Braun remarked to a friend that the rocket had worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet). But the war was already lost for Nazi Germany. Caught between the advancing Russian and U.S. armies, Von Braun and most of his tried, tested rocket team decided to go with the West. They fueled trucks with rocket alcohol and headed south. Von Braun had printed official-looking stickers with the mysterious letters VZBV—standing for some fictional sort of “Special Project Disposition”—which cleared all roadblocks for them. During the trip Von Braun’s driver fell asleep at the wheel, the car crashed, Von Braun’s left arm was broken and his face gashed (he still has a scar above his lip). Von Braun and Dornberger stayed three weeks in a Bavarian mountain lodge, finally sent Von Braun’s younger brother, Magnus, bicycling downhill to invite the Americans to come and capture Peenemünde’s top rocketmen. (Says Magnus: “I was the youngest, I spoke the best English, and I was the most expendable.”) The U.S. Army was delighted to accept that invitation and, in a project known as Operation Paperclip, selected Von Braun and 120 of his best team members to go to the U.S. under contract with the Army to build rockets.

“How Dignified?” Once it had them, the U.S. hardly knew what to do with the German rocketeers. The world was again at peace, and no Congressman in his right mind would appropriate money for missilery or for Von Braun’s dream of space exploration. Von Braun and his men, lonely and discouraged, were set down at Fort Bliss, Texas, left to tinker around, pretty much by themselves, with old V-25, moved no closer to space. The Korean war changed that: in 1950 the German scientists were rushed bag and baggage to Huntsville (see box) with orders to build the Army a long-range missile with nuclear-payload capability. Result: the Redstone missile, successfully launched at Cape Canaveral in 1953.

For the 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; a panel of scientists sailed into the picture to recommend that the U.S. satellite become a project for the International Geophysical Year, and decided to put their money on the beautifully designed but totally untried Navy Vanguard. Argued Wernher von Braun: “This is not a design contest. It is a contest to get a satellite into orbit, and we’re way ahead on this.” He was overruled. In the astonishing 1955 decision to divorce satellite development from weaponry, the Vanguard was accepted as having more “dignity.” Snorted Wernher von Braun at the time: “I’m all for dignity. But this is a cold-war tool. How dignified would our position really be if a man-made star of unknown origin suddenly appeared in our skies?”

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 moon into orbit.

By Sept. 20, 1956, the first Jupiter-C was ready for firing at Cape Canaveral. It was a four-stage missile, with even a dummy fourth-stage satellite configuration—just like the bird that last fortnight put Explorer into orbit. By this time, Pentagon brass had a notion that Von Braun might be trying to beat the Navy into space with an unauthorized—and presumably undignified—major satellite. The Army, which had had the foresight to bring Von Braun and his team to the U.S. in the first place, and which had supported him all along in the face of awesome obstacles, would have liked nothing better than for him to toss up the first U.S. satellite. Such men as Lieut. General James Gavin, the brainy chief of Research and Development, and Major General John Medaris, the able military commander at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, saw in a successful moon, and its proof of rocket superiority, a way for the Army to break out of its post-Korea roles-and-missions bog-down. But the orders giving Vanguard its exclusive franchise on space were clear and firm, and the Army could not risk defying them.

General Medaris therefore had no choice but to call Von Braun. “Wernher,” said he, “I must put you under direct orders personally to inspect that fourth stage to make sure it is not live.” Without a satellite, Jupiter-C flew 3,300 miles—farther than any U.S. missile before or since. Wernher von Braun knew then that he could surely launch a satellite—if given the chance.

The Chance. He got his chance, months later, the hard way. On the night of Oct. 4, 1957, Von Braun was called to the telephone from a Redstone dinner honoring Defense Secretary-designate Neil Mc-Elroy. Voice on the wire: “New York Times calling, Doctor.” Von Braun: “Yes?” Timesman: “Well, what do you think of it?” Von Braun: “Think of what?” Timesman: “The Russian satellite, the one they just orbited.”

Von Braun hurried back to the dinner table, broke the news of Sputnik I, turned earnestly to Neil McElroy. “Sir,” he said, “when you get back to Washington you’ll find that all hell has broken loose. I wish you would keep one thought in mind through all the noise and confusion: we can fire a satellite into orbit 60 days from the moment you give us the green light.” Army Secretary Wilber Brucker, who had accompanied McElroy, raised a hand of objection: “Not 60 days.” Von Braun was insistent: “Sixty days.” General Medaris settled it: “Ninety days.” Neil McElroy remembered the Army’s promise (for that matter the Army, with constant pleas for a stake in space, did not give him a chance to forget), and two weeks after taking office he made his decision. Wernher von Braun heard about it when Medaris’ voice came over his Redstone squawk box. “Wernher,” said Medaris, “let’s go!”

A Good Dusting. Von Braun went—and fast. The very next week, he reserved Cape Canaveral range time for the night of Jan. 29, 1958, between 10:30 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. (he would have hit it right on the nose except for bad weather). Jupiter-C had been ready for months. Says Von Braun: “All she needed was a good dusting. We simply took every bit of care on her that was humanly possible. That is the most you can do and the least you can do in missilery.”

But the satellite itself, with its delicate instrumentation, might well have held the whole project up for months or years—had not Wernher von Braun, during most of the period that he was barred from engaging in satellite work, been in what he calls “silent coordination” with Caltech’s William Pickering and the University of Iowa’s James Van Allen in planning Explorer and its instruments.

A Genius Quality. Thus, just 84 days after the go-ahead from McElroy, the U.S. Explorer streaked into space. And last week Wernher von Braun, who sweated out the shoot in Washington (TIME, Feb. 10), returned to his white frame house on Huntsville’s “Sauerkraut Hill”—and to the brightest new day that his Army-run German rocket team had faced in more than 20 years.

Some 3,300 scientists and technicians work under Von Braun—but the top men, without exception, are old Peenemunde hands. Nearly all of them, including Von Braun, have become U.S. citizens. Nearly all could make more money in private industry, but they have refused to leave the job. Why? Because they are all enthusiasts, caught up in the space dream. Asks Wernher von Braun scornfully: “What corporation would have sent up a satellite two weeks ago?”

Redstone has no set routine. “Once you have routine,” says a lab chief, “you don’t have development any longer. Everything changes, and if we stopped changing, we would be out of business.” Each man is tops in his own field, works with a minimum of interference from Von Braun. Says one: “If you leave me alone in peace, maybe I’ll get finished in a year. If you try to help me, it may take me three years.” Yet the work has to be held together, and that is Von Braun’s job. It is a job to which he brings a spectrum of knowledge that spans many specialties. Explains Test Lab Chief Karl Heimburg: “I might find it hard to comprehend what Walter Haeusserman [head of the guidance and control lab] is saying. His field is strange to me. Yet Professor von Braun can restate it and make me see clear as day. This is a genius quality.”

The Future of Man. When Wernher von Braun goes home at night, his wife Maria (they have two daughters, Margrit, 5, and Iris, 9) can tell what sort of day he has had “before he even gets to the screen door—he shows everything in his face.” The Von Brauns rarely leave their home at night, listen to chamber music on their old-fashioned low-fi (they have no television set) while Von Braun pores over books in the living room. There, Wernher von Braun last week talked to TIME Correspondent Edwin Rees about his team’s success with Explorer—and the future of man in space.

America has really been nice to us, and although we had to sit around and see the U.S. make some of the mistakes we had made long ago in missilery—it was like coming around the same track again—and we did feel frustrated at times, we are awfully lucky to have carried the day. It makes us feel that we paid back part of a debt of gratitude we owed this country.

Missiles are really interim weapons. This is because both nations have them. Man will always seek the ultimate weapon. And you know what this is? The ultimate weapon is what the other fellow doesn’t have. A Piper Cub would take care of the entire Roman army; one machine gun could have eliminated the hordes of Attila. These are ultimate weapons. And so would the control of space be. Man must establish the principle of the freedom of space as he has done with freedom of the seas. And like everything else, we can only establish this from a position of relative strength.

You know, some think of the earth as a safe and comfortable planet, and they say that space is a hostile environment. This is not really true. Earth is protected by its blanket of atmosphere, to be sure, but it is a disorderly place, and unpredictable. It is full of storms and winds, of fogs and ice, of earthquakes. It is also full of people —people with thermonuclear bombs.

There is beauty in space, and it is orderly. There is no weather, and there is regularity. It is predictable. Just look at our little Explorer; you can set your clock by it—literally; it is more accurate than your clock. Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws, and obey them, space will treat you kindly. And don’t tell me man doesn’t belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go—and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.