Wernher von Braun and the V-2 rocket

Hey everyone,

Wernher von Braun is famous for his work on rockets, especially the German V-2, the United States ICBM, and the Saturn rocket that took astronauts to the moon, but I'm going to start with von Braun's earliest achievement and life and come back to his work on the Saturn rocket. He was born in the German Empire in 1912. As a youth, he did not excel at physics or mathematics, but he was interested in space. After reading Oberth's By Rocket into Planetary Space, he switched to math and physics and focused on space travel. Von Braun also worked with Oberth on his liquid fueled rockets. When the Nazis came to power, he began to work on rocket propelled missiles, and, by the end of 1934, he and his group of scientists and workers had fired two rockets which achieved altitudes of 2.2 km and 3.5 km. He continued to work for the Nazis and, by 1944, they had developed a rocket that could strike London from Germany. However, this end result saddened von Braun who very much wanted the rocket to be used for space travel. During World War II, slave laborers were used for the rocketry program after a shortage of workers developed. Von Braun himself visited some of the factories and camps and admitted that the workers were in pitiful shape, but he felt unable to do anything about it. Eventually, von Braun would be imprisoned for a short time because he wanted to work on a spaceship and felt they were losing the war. He was soon released because he was considered to be irreplaceable. Indeed, he was correct that they were losing the war, and von Braun would soon surrender to American forces in May, 1945. Upon surrender, he was transported to the United States to work on rockets. I will continue von Braun's story in a later post.