Nazi weapon carried man to the Moon
It is 16 July 1969. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people are watching their TVs, peering at black-and-white images of the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where history’s biggest rocket – an 111-metre-high Saturn V – is ready for launch. The rocket must escape Earth’s gravity to take humans to a new world for the first time.
In NASA’s Mission Control, engineers are holding their breath as the five engines guzzle approximately 20 tonnes of fuel per second in preparation for lift-off. At 9.32 AM, it happens. The entire launch area trembles as the world’s most powerful rocket rises almost unnaturally slowly from the pad in a cloud of white-hot gas, climbing ever faster through the air towards the Moon. In Mission Control, everyone bursts into applause.
A few days later, one of history’s major events will take place: Neil Armstrong sets foot on the Moon. It is a global event, and a triumph for the USA. Yet the key man behind the Saturn V is Wernher von Braun, a Ger-man engineer, and
