Wernher von Braun

By Erik Bergaust

Here is Dr. Wernher von Braun’s incredible story – from his early years in Germany, where he gave birth to modern rocketry, to his arrival in the United States and his launching of the first American satellite, the first man on the moon and other stunning space exploration feats. “Every page of Wernher von Braun’s life is a monument to the drama of adventure. Few people have been fighting so hard and, indeed, very few have been subject to so much criticism, so much jealousy, so much defeat—yet, very few have lived to be honored and to harvest the fruits of so many wonderful victories as has this man.” Author Erik Bergaust has had the advantage of knowing von Braun as a friend, hunting and fishing companion, space business associate—and biographer—for more than twenty-five years. Thus, he has been able to present a dramatic portrait of an important personality and a 20th century hero.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780811766234

Book preview

1

Reaching for the Stars

GUSTY WINDS HAD COME DOWN from the Arctic, carrying ghosts of great storms across the vanishing summer on this high mountain plateau in southern Norway. There had been rain, earlier, and then the sleet. And now there was snow, thick and bitter flurries to haunt this land. Wernher von Braun and I had been searching for shelter.

The bad weather had run us to earth behind a huge rock. We were out of the wind, but all of us and all we wore were wet and cold. Our binoculars were useless, but we had kept the plastic covers on our rifle scopes with the thought we would need dry, clear lenses when we saw the game—the shy and hard-to-get reindeer, the Norwegian version of the caribou.

This thought—of seeing game—was growing weaker, drowned in the weather, frozen in the wind. The others in our hunting party, five American red-coats and our Norse guide, had vanished in the wilderness of the plateau and its weather. We were thinking more, now, of the fog and snow and finding our way back to civilization.

As we sat there—huddling with a cup of lukewarm coffee from my thermos—one of the red hunting jackets appeared in the snow. Jack Pruitt, bent with struggle against the slope and the wind, came toward the sanctuary of our rock. He gasped, reaching for breath, and sat down without taking off his rucksack. After a few moments, von Braun spoke:

Well, here we are—on our way toward the twenty-first century!

It’s beautiful, Pruitt replied.

Von Braun agreed. Cold weather and snow flurries didn’t bother this physically fit and seasoned hunter and outdoorsman. He wiped the icy droplets off his .300 magnum Mark IV, a gift from Roy Weatherby.

Look at this country, he said, pointing with his right hand in the direction of the Hallingskarven Mountain, have you ever in your life seen anything so magnificent?

Fantastic! Pruitt said. He got up, took his rifle and walked on. I’m going to find myself a buck! Von Braun and I decided to stay put a little while longer.

The Hardangervidda reaches across southern Norway, from the North Sea coast on toward eastern Norway. There are 4,000 square miles of it, sometimes gentle and rolling, sometimes chopped with sudden valleys and quick hills. It is set with ponds and streams. And it often looks like a carefully tended rock garden. The rocks and boulders are scattered across fantastic vegetation. Nothing grows higher into the wind than two or three feet, including the dwarf white birch which looks a bit like an example of bonsai. There are colorful heathers, mosses, lichens, flowers, grasses—this is indeed a vast paradise. The altitude is above the 3,000-foot level. Things live here. Those crystal ponds and lakes are full of some of the finest trout I have ever seen, caught and tasted. There are ptarmigan, lemmings, ermine, bobcats, badgers, foxes and reindeer.

When you realize that life can flourish under the conditions that exist here, it must be considered reasonable to assume that there would be some form of life on many other planets in the universe, I said philosophically.

In all probability—yes, he said quickly. And at this moment he switched gears completely and emphatically. This was so typical of him. All of a sudden his genius mind was now prepared to tackle the immense subject of interstellar space flight.

You know, he began with a twinkle in his blue eyes, the past few decades should have taught us to use the word ‘impossible’ with utmost caution. Nevertheless, human travel beyond our own solar system in search of life elsewhere in the universe is a staggering concept. Even the most reckless of us do not expect it to come about for several generations. One-way, unmanned probes, maybe. But a full-fledged human expedition capable of returning to Earth is a tall order!

I was eager to have him continue. While I wiped the water droplets off my rifle scope, I said slowly, I suppose we’ll be talking about travel at the speed of light?

Exactly. And that is a frightening thought. To build a rocket powerful enough to travel at the speed of light will really strain your imagination. Light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, needs 8.3 minutes to span the 93 million miles between the Sun and our planet. But it takes 4.3 years to reach Alfa Centauri, the nearest fixed star. It takes 470 years to Polaris and 27,700 years to get to the center of our galaxy—a lens-shaped island in space, a little less than 100,000 light-years in diameter, made up of an estimated 200 billion suns.

He was looking straight at me as he continued. He was getting ready to communicate the essential part of his message.

"To build a rocket powerful enough to travel that far we must contemplate an entirely new art. We have to impart to an object a velocity of slightly more than 25,000 feet per second to place it in a low orbit around the Earth. About 36,000 feet per second is needed to hurl it to the Moon—which is still within the range of the Earth’s pull—and just a trifle more to kick it completely out of the Earth’s gravitational pull. If we accelerate it up to a terminal speed of 56,000 feet per second—in such a fashion that it leaves the Earth in the same direction in which our planet is orbiting at 107,000 feet per second around the Sun—it will enter a parabolic flight path and escape from the solar system.

From the point of view of power requirements, a needed velocity of 56,000 feet per second may not be too bad. After all, that’s only 38,000 miles per hour. Just one extra stage on top of our Apollo Moon rocket Saturn V could impart that speed to an object of about 8,000 pounds. And if we timed our launching in such a way that the receding uppermost stage gets a suitable boost assist by Jupiter’s powerful gravitational field, we could even double that payload. But as the object coasted, its power spent, on its uphill path out of the pull of the Sun’s gravity, its speed would gradually diminish almost to zero. Thousands of years would elapse before it reached one of the nearest fixed stars.

From this dissertation it was quite evident that he, at one time or another, must have studied the problem thoroughly, in anticipation of using his Saturn booster rockets for interplanetary flight. Regardless, I knew full well that these calculations—seemingly off the top of his head—would be correct.

To reduce travel time to other fixed stars to figures compatible with the life span of man, he continued, "travel speeds must approach the speed of light. Not even nuclear-fission or nuclear-fusion processes are adequate to produce such speeds. For all their dramatic display of power, they convert only a fraction of the mass involved into energy. It would be necessary to devise a rocket mechanism wherein the entire mass of the injected propellant is converted into radiation energy. And this—by the way—is in accordance with Einstein’s famous equation: E = MC2. The exhaust of such a vehicle, a so-called photon rocket, would of course be equal to the velocity of light.

"The problem is that nobody knows—yet—how to build a photon rocket. Certain subatomic processes are known, such as the joining of a small negatively charged particle, the electron, with an equally small positively charged particle, the positron, that directly transform matter into energy according to Einstein’s equation. But so far physicists have been unable to devise any large-scale processes for this transformation.

There are also tremendous engineering obstacles. By definition, a photon rocket converts its propellant stream into an extremely powerful light beam. To bundle this beam, some sort of mirror is needed. Even if it had a reflectivity of ninety-nine percent, better than our existing ones, that one percent of absorbed radiation energy would instantly melt the mirror—considering the billions of kilowatts converted into the power carried away by the light beam.

Let’s assume that—some time in the future—we’ll be able to lick the engineering problems, I said.

All right, he continued eagerly. Supposing that we did have a rocket capable of beaming away a hundred percent of the mass of its propellant with an exhaust velocity equal to the speed of light, what could we do with it? Well, if the rocket had a mass ratio—the ratio between its fully fueled and empty weight—of 3, it could reach 80 percent of the speed of light. With a mass ratio of 10, its terminal velocity would be about 98 percent; and with a mass ratio of 1,000—about what we have in some multistage planetary rockets—we would hit 99.9998 percent of the speed of light.

Would it be possible to travel faster than the speed of light?

It is impossible to exceed the speed of light. But this statement is partly a matter of definition. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which has stood the test of many critical experiments and has been universally accepted by the scientific community, shows that the inertia of an object’s mass approaches infinity as the object approaches the speed of light. Hence, it would take infinite power to accelerate an object beyond the so-called light-barrier. But, amazingly enough, the same theory states that a stellar astronaut could still travel to a star a thousand light-years away and return within his adult life.

This was what I wanted to hear him explain—time dilation. He was getting to it now.

Yes, he went on, "incredible as it may sound, an astronaut could travel 2,000 light-years in a lifetime. Time dilation would help him to stay young. For many people, the strange phenomenon called time dilation is a hard pill to swallow. The flow of time appears to us completely unaffected by physical conditions. Whether we sleep or work, sit at a desk or in a speeding jetliner, our wrist watch seems to tick away at the same pace. So does our heart. But the fact is that this cherished piece of everyday experience is valid only in the realm of relatively low velocities in which we slowpokes live.

"A meson—which is an unstable subatomic particle—when traveling at a velocity close to the speed of light, has a clearly longer decay time than its 2.1-microsecond so-called half-life at lower speeds, when an earth-fixed observer does the timing. But if the observer were flying along with the meson, the half-life of 2.1 microseconds would not seem to be affected by the particle’s speed, since the observer’s watch would be subjected to the same dilation as the meson itself.

The Theory of Relativity tells us that the pace of time becomes slower and slower for an object approaching the speed of light, compared with time’s rate of passage for a stationary observer. At the speed of light itself—an upper limit that no object can ever reach—time would come to a complete standstill. If an object could go that fast, it could cover vast distances while, for a man flying along with it, no time would elapse—neither for his watch nor for his heartbeat, which controls his life span.

The snow flurries had ceased to fly. I knew we would have to press on with the hunt. But I didn’t want to interrupt him.

Well, I said, let’s assume we want to send a stellar astronaut on to a solar system one thousand light-years away . . .

The time dilation effect makes it possible to travel from the Earth to a fixed star a thousand light-years away in what the astronaut would think was 13.2 years. For the trip back he would need another 13.2 years. If he didn’t spend any additional time at his destination he would thus have been aboard his ship for 26.4 years. The trouble is that, during his absence, more than—and get this—two thousand years would have elapsed on Earth! Thus, upon return, he might wind up in a zoo or at least get stared at as a man from antiquity.

At this moment flashes of bright sunshine burst through the broken clouds. They were flying fast toward the southeast. We scanned the horizon with our rifle scopes. All of a sudden we could see for miles. Von Braun, the explorer, switched gears again. He became enthusiastic, almost boyish, as he continued to make gestures toward a group of distant glaciers and the snow-covered Hallingskarven, the 6,000-foot giant of a mountain to the north.

This was in late September 1971. We had left our lodge and headquarters at the resort town of Geilo after breakfast and the compulsory shooting test at the Geilo firing range. This was the first of the many things that made this one of the most unusual hunting trips von Braun and I had ever enjoyed together in nearly twenty-five years as outdoorsmen and friends. Von Braun admired the Norwegians for this rule, that no hunting license will be issued until after you have proven to the sheriff or other authorities that you can achieve a score of at least 48 points out of a possible 60, using six bullets at a distance of 100 yards. Our group had done well that morning. Everyone had scored in the high fifties.

It had been a two-hour drive from Geilo into the wilderness of the plateau, where we parked our cars. At the end of a bumpy dirt road, we grabbed our gear and guns and began a long, long trek through small valleys, ravines and across hills and creeks and swampy moors. All the time we must walk into the wind, because the reindeer is a marvelous animal that has a toughness and extraordinary sight, hearing and sense to survive ice ages and more than 15 million years of changing prehistory—plus a few centuries of heavy hunting by man.

Our guide had received reports that morning about two huge herds of about 5,000 animals north of our starting point. Von Braun has hunted everything from whitetail deer and moose to African big game but he had never heard of any kind of hunting, not even in Africa, where the game moved in such gigantic herds. And we could not find them, not today.

This was his first trip to my native Norway. He had many things to learn and many things to wonder about. He had been entranced by the breathtaking views during the first couple of days in the fjord country on the West Coast, had been embarrassed by unbelievable hospitality in the city of Stavanger and at its magnificent Hotel Atlantic, and had relaxed comfortably in a rustic cabin, fished salmon, skimmed along the fjords in hydrofoil boats, visited the medieval ruins in Bergen and viewed the grandeur of the rugged Norwegian coastline from a mountain top where Edvard Grieg so solemnly found the inspiration he needed to write some of his finest works. Then, we had taken the daytime express train across the mountains to Geilo for the climax—the two-day reindeer hunt. We were not successful the first day. None of us had seen any game. We returned in the evening—wet and cold. Yet, hopeful.

Our group consisted of our fellow friends and members of the American Vikings Rod & Gun Club of Washington, D. C. Most of the members were Norwegians or Swedes or Norwegian-Americans or Swedish-Americans or just plain Americans whose ancestors came from Scandinavia. We jokingly maintained that German-born von Braun qualified because he has some Swedish blood in him, the family on his mother’s side—the von Quistorps—being of Swedish background. However, many of our members have no Nordic connection whatsoever. The fellows come from all walks of life; the Scandinavian touch really stems from the fact that I, the Norwegian-American who had founded the club, had frequently taken many friends to Norway on fishing and hunting trips.

Von Braun has been fishing and hunting in Alaska and Canada and has had the opportunity to have been flown into virgin territory by tough bush pilots. He admitted that Norwegian pilots probably deserve the classification super-bush. And, if it had not been for our skilled pilot and his sixseater Cessna seaplane, we probably would not have had such a great and unique hunt. The guide had decided to send out the airplane on a reconnaissance mission shortly after dawn the next day, and when the pilot reported back that two huge herds of deer were roaming the plateau some 30 miles to the southeast, we jumped into the cars and were off to the little town of Halne, where the seaplane was waiting for us. It would have to make two trips to get the eager hunters to a small lake in the vicinity of where the pilot had last spotted the biggest of the herds.

We bounced over the choppy waves of the Halnefjord lake into the westerly wind, gained altitude and made a gentle turn into the sun. Being seated next to the pilot, von Braun had a panorama type view of the plateau, the glaciers and the mountains. This sight he shall never forget, I thought. There was hardly a cloud in the sky; the sun had already caused most of yesterday’s snow to disappear, but the wet moss and heather, soaked with droplets of water, were aflame in almost unbelievable colors. The whole area was simply shining and sparkling in a color spectrum too fantastic to describe. The entire plateau ahead of us opened up with the exuberance of some sort of heartland designed to please man’s instinct for raw nature, to quench his thirst for the savoring of the wilderness—a land where even time seemed to stand still. There was not a sign of civilization below, no roads, no trails. The whole area appeared like a wilderness of gardens with ponds and lakes and palisades of peaks and ridges neatly arranged with its thousands of colors. This was for him. Von Braun, the outdoorsman and explorer, could hardly wait to get down in order to get up along the side of one of those ridges, where the approach to the top seemed to be so gentle and reflective. The hardship of yesterday was forgotten. This was the Hardangervidda he had heard so much about.

Suddenly, the pilot banked the aircraft sharply to the left and pointed with his right-hand thumb down toward a valley. And—right below us, five hundred feet away, was a herd of thousands of animals moving steadily and slowly toward the west. We made a full circle over this unbelievable mass of deer and landed gently on a small lake some ten miles away. It would still be a challenge to track down and find the animals. The first group would have about an hour’s wait for the Cessna to return with the rest of the club members, so we sat down behind a small hill that tore into the lake like a pier.

Seated comfortably in the heather and moss, I wanted to hear him talk some more about interstellar flight.

The photon rocket you talked about yesterday, I began, I suppose you must contemplate a certain continuous acceleration. The human body can’t tolerate a blast from zero to the speed of light—just like that.

He took up the challenge almost immediately. He was getting ready to give me the rest of the story.

"My previous time figures were based on a photon rocket capable of a continuous acceleration of 1 G. With a mass ratio large enough to get us very close to the speed of light; it carries us to a star one thousand light-years away, and slows us down to normal speeds so we can visit one of the star’s planets. The rocket is also to be capable of flying us back to Earth—possibly by refueling during the stay at that distant solar system.

"As we depart from Earth, the stars of the firmament will first appear in their familiar yellowish hue. As our vehicle builds up speed toward our target star, the Doppler effect will cause a striking change in this star’s color. From its original yellow, the light from it will shift through green, blue, violet, and toward ultraviolet—in other words, to higher frequencies. At the same time, the color of the receding Sun will slowly change from yellow to orange, red, and toward infrared—that is, to lower frequencies.

"This is easy to understand. A boat running against the waves is hit by them at a higher frequency than a stationary pier is. A boat running with the waves, at a reduced frequency. Do you follow me?"

Yes, I said. I’m still with you.

"After about 3½ months our stellar photon rocket has reached about thirty percent of the speed of light. The frequency of the Sun’s peak radiation output now passes the border of the visible spectrum and moves into the infrared. As a result, the Sun dims rapidly and soon becomes invisible. One month later, the destination star likewise becomes invisible—the peak of its radiation intensity has shifted into the ultraviolet.

"As our velocity keeps increasing, two circular dark spots are formed around the destination star and the Sun, and keep growing in diameter. Between these blind ‘bow and stern spots,’ the stars of the firmament appear as a multicolored array of concentric circles, like a huge rainbow—near the black bow spot, the stars look violet. Further aft, they are blue and green. Abeam, they shine in their original yellowish hue. Still farther aft, they look orange. And the dark stern spot is surrounded by a ring of red stars.

"Due to so-called relativistic effects, the dark bow spot grows only to an opening angle of 43 degrees. After we exceed seventy-four percent of the speed of light—eleven months after departure—it begins to contract again. But the stern spot around the Sun continues to grow steadily. Hence, as our traveling speed approaches the speed of light, the visible portion of the firmament will become compressed into an ever-narrowing rainbow around the invisible target star. The opening angle of the yellow ring, in this rainbow, is a perfect yardstick for the ratio between our traveling speed and the speed of light. In analogy to the well-known Mach Number—ratio of flight speed to speed of sound—this ratio is sometimes called the Einstein Number.

In 6.6 years from the time of departure our speeding photon rocket hits Einstein Number .999998, and we are at the halfway point of our journey. However, on trying to measure the remaining distance to our destination star—now emitting predominately X-rays—we find it only about a light-year away! In fact, without further power application we would pass it a year later—7.6 years’ dilated ship’s time after departure—if we were to refrain from slowing down for our forthcoming visit.

But we have to turn the rocket around in order to slow us down?

Right—we have to turn the ship around and use our photonic rocket thrust for braking. Of course, our slowing down means that we’ll reach our target, not in another year, but much later. Only after another 6.6 years—13.2 years after departure—will we near our target at a relative approach speed close to zero. During the second 6.6 years, that is, during the retardation maneuver, all of those rainbow phenomena of the acceleration period will take place in reverse. Upon arrival, the firmament will look like its old self again.

And now we are one thousand light-years away from home?

Yes. If we had a telescope powerful enough to observe events on Earth from our new vantage point, we would find our home planet very much as it was when we left it. But, being one thousand light-years away, we are actually watching events that happened on Earth one thousand years ago.

"Then, this is actually the non-dilated time that has elapsed on Earth since we left?"

Exactly—the amazing thing is that, due to the time dilation aboard our speeding rocket, we have aged only 13.2 years during our outbound voyage, he said with a big smile.

I smiled a little too. But I knew I would have to go over this whole thing in my mind—several times—before I would grasp it completely.

And all of this is in harmony with the laws of physics and space and time? I asked.

"Eerie as this may sound, it is all in perfect harmony with modern ideas of the laws of space and time. Look at it this way: Men today have the same difficulty in accepting the concept of relativistic time that our ancestors had in seeing how people down under in Australia could walk head down without dropping off the globe. But that is because our experience does not include very great distances and extremely high speeds.

While the insights of modern physics permit us to dissect the anatomy of interstellar flight, we must forego rash conclusions that any such flights are imminent or feasible. We cannot yet even define an adequate power source. If we had it, many problems of using it would be beyond us. Other obstacles may be even more formidable. For instance, what would happen to an interstellar rocket that hit even a small meteoroid, if the collision were taking place at the speed of light?

I still find it intriguing that we can respond to the challenge of stellar space flight—even if it is solely with intellectual concepts and purely hypothetical analysis. It’s fantastic, I said seriously.

You’re absolutely right. But for God’s sake, don’t ever forget that hardware solutions are still entirely beyond our reach and far, far away. In other words, don’t quote me as having said that we are ready to build a photon rocket!

We sat quietly for a while. Finally, von Braun began to talk hunting strategy. He was trying to recall all the advice he had received in the last few days about hunting reindeer. There were many aspects that made this type of hunting entirely different from anything he had ever done. For example, on all his deer and moose hunts in the States and in Canada, he had been hunting in the woods; this place had not a single tree that one could hide behind. Furthermore, you couldn’t sit down at some stand and wait for the animal to come to you; the reindeer always moves into the wind while grazing, so the hunter must come up on the animals from behind or from the sides. Once he is close enough to the herd, he cannot shoot into the main herd itself, because he may cause injuries to several animals and not get a clean kill—and, after all, he is only allowed to shoot one deer. He must go for the animals which stray behind the main herd, or to the side of the main herd. Even then, he will have a tough time finding his buck, because both the female and male reindeer are equipped with antlers. And it is almost unheard of that a hunter will succeed in getting any closer to the game than one hundred yards or so.

When we first planned this expedition, back in March, the idea of shooting reindeer somehow didn’t quite hit von Braun right. He said he didn’t know whether it was his son Peter’s Santa Claus complex or the mere fact that the sound of the word reindeer played tricks with his conscience. Perhaps, if the rest of us had used the word caribou when we invited him to come along, then he might have been more enthusiastic, he said. The fact is that the caribou is the common name for all reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) that roam in sub-arctic areas in North America, Greenland, Spitsbergen, Siberia, Sweden and Norway. There are 210,000 reindeer in Norway, according to the Norwegian Wildlife Commission. About 170,000 of them are tame and are raised by the Lapplanders of Finn mark, the northernmost region of the country. All of the wild animals are found in the mountainous area of the south. Wildlife experts have established that the plateau cannot possibly sustain any more animals, and since the productivity of the reindeer hovers around twenty-five percent, it is desirable to harvest about 7,500 of them annually. This is executed by the Norwegians as a carefully balanced conservation hunting program. The end result becomes a two-fold achievement: the species is saved from extinction, and the animals don’t starve to death-which is common in so many other places around the world.

The reindeer is of about the same size as his American cousin, the whitetail deer, but his rack is tremendously much bigger. A 28-point buck is not unusual, and, as I have mentioned, both sexes grow horns. Otherwise, the reindeer differs from the whitetail deer by virtue of being a hard worker—he is constantly on the move from dawn until dusk, sometimes traveling fifty miles in the process. The whitetail deer generally moves about quite a bit in the dark hours and at dawn and dusk, but this animal has a tendency to bed down during the day. Many conservation experts have told me that they consider the whitetail animal a lazy critter which seldom moves more than a mile or so from where he was born. Most of the times von Braun and I have been hunting whitetail deer, we have had to get up at four o’clock in the morning in order to be on our stands before daybreak. After a few cold and miserable hours on a tree stump, it’s either back to camp or your party tries to drive the animals out of their beds, and then it’s back to the tree stump again in the evening.

In contrast, reindeer hunting involves walking. Lots of walking, as von Braun will probably always remember. You trek mile after mile after mile, and you sit down only when your legs begin to tremble and when you need a cup of hot coffee in order to be able to continue the walking. Yet, you don’t have to start before dawn. Once you know where the animals are you can go after them at any time during the day. However, an important thing is the timing of your return. You must watch the time constantly in order to estimate your return trek, unless you are prepared to miss your airplane and spend the night in dangerously cold weather among moss and volcanic rocks. Needless to say, it is vital to remember that your capacity for struggle is considerably reduced by the fact that you often gasp for oxygen at the reindeer altitude.

After a long hour of such thoughts—and of thoughts of interstellar travel—the Cessna finally sat down again on the lake and unloaded the rest of the party. We gave them a hand with the unloading of rucksacks, binoculars and guns. The last man to crawl out was our aviation man, George Bates of the Federal Aviation Administration, who jokingly said, I don’t remember offhand what the FAA payload restrictions are for this Cessna, but I sure hope this pilot knows what they are!

After about two hours of steady walking and about halfway to the top of an impressive ridge, the guide came to a halt and told us to rest for a while. It took some time for the last hunters to catch up with us, and we were into the second cup of coffee by the time the whole group was together again. Then, all of a sudden, we saw a reindeer moving slowly along the top of the ridge, then a second and a third. Then a herd of what appeared to be at least a hundred animals came into sight, about half a mile from where we were sitting. We were all flat on our stomachs by now, every man following the deer through rifle scopes or binoculars.

At this moment the animals on the ridge disappeared back over the side from which they had emerged, and I was wondering whether they might have spotted or sensed us and if they were changing course. By now we were strung out again in proper positions along the ridge, much closer to the top than before. And before we knew it, an ocean of reindeer came rolling over the ridge right into our laps.

Von Braun and I were pretty close to Don Foxvog, a Public Information Officer of the Veterans Administration, over on our right. We all froze at the sight of the herd and tried to hide behind big rocks or among clusters of dwarf birches. The distance to the herd, which apparently had not spotted us, was about six hundred yards, but they kept coming closer. I estimate that the first batch of animals amounted to something like six hundred deer, and I assumed that this was the advance group of the main herd, which probably would appear over the ridge at any moment. Then we heard a shot far to the left, probably fired by Arne Ruud, the last man in our party. And we noticed how the animals in front of us immediately became restless. They stopped, listened, smelled. Then they began splitting up into small groups of two, three or four—and to my amazement, they began moving about in all directions as if completely confused. We heard another shot, and another one. Then, our moment came. Three deer were approaching, and I smiled when von Braun crawled forward a foot or so to get into a better position.

He must have sent Mr. Weatherby a thankful thought at this moment for building such a beautiful scope. He had his buck nicely lined up—if the animal would only come a little closer. And it did. And when the buck was at a distance of about one hundred yards, von Braun shot. And the buck fell. Then Don fired, and then I. Seconds later, we heard shooting behind us, perhaps twelve shots in all. We stood up and looked around, reloaded our guns and wiped the sweat from our foreheads. Von Braun was running downhill toward the one he had bagged, and I hurried over to mine. They were nice. Not tremendously big, but probably at least 120 pounds. Von Braun pulled out his knife and began to dress out his first reindeer buck. Many crazy thoughts flashed through my mind, he said later. Here I was, in the middle of the greatest wilderness in Norway, high above the tree line, surrounded by 4,000 square miles of mountains clad in moss and heather, thousands of miles away from home—dressing out a reindeer. I even thought of my son, Peter. I kind of hoped that he didn’t believe in Santa Claus any more! How does a father explain to his kids that he has killed one of Santa’s beloved animals? I suppose it is difficult for a youngster to grasp the meaning of sincere hunting, that it is part of conservation and that most hunters usually are true protectors of the ecology.

Don’t worry, Wernher, I said. Santa’s reindeer come from the North Pole, not from Norway.

We had landed at the small lake before 9 o’clock as a bunch of optimistic and dreaming hopefuls. By noon we had turned into a group of hardworking huntsmen. We had to assist each other, because the task of skinning and cutting up the game in this terrain, where there is no place to string up the animal, is tremendous. The only way to get the meat back to the lake was to cut it up and carry it on our backs.

Von Braun had been so wrapped up in the hunt—the anticipation, the eagerness, the will to do his best and show his hunting companions that he was able to perform despite the fact that he was a novice, that he hadn’t noticed that the day was at its peak. The sun was shining warmly; it must have been a comfortable 50 degrees at noon. And as we began the long two-hour trek back to the lake, von Braun finally found time to notice that the hardy wildflowers, blue anemones and yellow daisies and purple heather, were still in their fullest bloom, despite the inclement weather of yesterday.

The Cessna came back early. It had to make four round trips between our little pond in the southeast corner of Hardangervidda and the Halnefjord lake, hauling tired and dirty hunters, their meat, antlers, guns, ruck-sacks and binoculars. The small airplane did its job, getting off the mountain lake and into the thin air with both grace and confidence.

The sun was setting by the time we landed at Halne. To von Braun, the Hardangervidda was to become a memory of glory in so many ways. Its yawning blue chasms now turned to gold, sprinkled with gems and crystals in mystic colors. I'll never forget its beauty and vastness, he said, with his most charming grin.

The rest of us were smiling, quite taken with the famous von Braun charm, perhaps one of the greatest of his many assets.

Somewhat amazed, perhaps, those of my hunting buddies who only knew von Braun as the father of modern-day rocketry, may have struggled a bit with the thought that he was such a charming person. Probably, they thought of von Braun as a cool wizard who had developed the V-2 rocket weapon for Hitler at the vast German Peenemünde development center on the Baltic coast, and the engineering genius the U.S. Army had whisked away to America after the war in 1945, to become the space hero who eventually built the mighty Saturn booster monsters that took America’s astronauts to the Moon.

2

A Built-in Warning System

My APPARENT RECOGNITION of von Braun’s charm as an important segment of the conglomerate that makes up his personality and character may seem awkward. But if I am to produce more than surface facts and surface acts and undertake an exploration of his character and art, then I must emphasize that his charm and charming ways always have played overwhelming roles—contributing substantially to his vast victories.

It is an entirely electric experience to be in the same room as von Braun. His very presence at a business meeting or space conference—or on hunting and fishing trips—makes the sparks fly. He can make the unspoken eloquent, can round an intimation into a metaphor, a nuance into a theme. At times he may start out gently and be von Braun, the soft-core, soft-focus and soft-witted sensation. Gradually, he will become articulate, concise and dynamic.

Nostalgia for the past can and does play tricks at times. Any man presumes that the heroes of his youth were far superior to any of his contemporaries—and to himself. There is, in fact, good evidence, more real than apparent, that there were indeed giants in the days of von Braun’s childhood and youth in Germany, including his own father. And they, logically, played an important role in the making of his character and personality. He often quotes Immanuel Kant. He was educated in an era when the classics—Goethe, Schiller, Darwin and Freud—made a serious impact on society.

Only time will tell whether von Braun himself will be judged by history as a giant. Certainly, to those thousands who have worked for him and struggled with him on the road toward the noble goals of the conquest of space, he is a giant. He has, invariably, been the prime cause of his own success—successes, really, since he has excelled in several separate fields of endeavor all his life. And future generations—at the very least—are apt to say he was larger than life.

As evidenced by his successful struggle along the rough path to the top in space technology, he always seemed to have a prescience for what would go well in the future and, even more useful, a built-in early warning system for survival in periods of crisis. He knows, for sure, that he has accomplished a lot. But he is typically cool about his successes; seemingly unperturbed about projects which were halted or canceled. He never talks about his own achievements.

A few years back, when the two of us were walking through the silent woods in the Virginia mountains after a long hunting day, a full moon emerged over a ridge behind us. Hey, look at the Moon! I exclaimed.

Von Braun turned around and snapped, Yes—we’ve been there.

To a congressman I think he would have said, Yes, sir. We have been there. Now, let’s get the money to go on to Mars!

He is incredibly boyish. Flying through a rugged valley westward from Anchorage toward Alaska’s famous Lake Clark one beautiful day in September 1974, he poked me in my ribs. Already, I was suffering from sitting in a cramped position in the Goose amphibian, crowded with Fairchild executives Edward G. Uhl, Irvin Singer, crew members and hunting gear.

Look! von Braun shouted through the engine roar. Look! There’s Mount McKinley! And over there! Look at that glacier!

Yes, Wernher, I answered. It’s beautiful.

I knew he had heard me. Yet, he shouted again, Look, Erik! Do you see Mount McKinley? He continued to poke me in the ribs.

Yes, Wernher. I see it.

Well, damn it! Look at it!

Yes, Wernher. I’m looking!

He was a million miles away from the Space Shuttle, from communications satellites and whatever. In complete ecstasy. Boy all the way. Both his mind and his heart those of a true explorer.

In November 1956, we went on an immense and unforgettable duck hunting expedition to a place near Stuttgart, Arkansas. It was crowded in the little hunting cabin with a total of some twelve hunters. Getting up at four in the morning, and being ordered by our host and guide, Tennessee banker and famous hunter Dan Maddox, to hurry up, caused quite a ruckus. We scrambled for longjohns, puffy insulated clothing, hastily cooked breakfast, shotguns, binoculars. But most of all, we scrambled to use the small bathroom. That was no easy task, particularly difficult to accomplish at this early hour—in a hurry.

Several of us stood in line impatiently while von Braun was inside the cherished room. Come on, Wernher! someone up front shouted. Let’s hurry it up!

Von Braun made his exit with a broad smile and this comment: The only thing I don’t like about these hunting trips is that they upset my crapping schedule! We all roared with laughter because of the fitting truism in his statement. It set a congenial pace for the entire hunt.

I continue to be amazed, and it will always remain a mystery to me, how he can be so much genius and scientist, oftentimes a typical absent-minded professor, yet, have all the qualities of a boy, a sportsman and such a vivid buddy, cracking common down-to-earth jokes and telling stories in the most human way.

Before we embarked on the perils of the reindeer hunt in Norway, I met him at the airport in Bergen. He came off the airplane from London, wearing sunglasses, a heavy sports jacket and his Russian fur hat. He was traveling incognito as Mr. Brown. We embraced in the airport hall, picked up his baggage and took off in sunny weather to see the various famous spots in the old Norse capital.

He had told me—back in March—when we first planned this trip, that he had always wanted to visit Bergen, since it was the birthplace and home of one of his favorite composers, Edvard Grieg. A Sunday at home in the von Braun residence is often a calm and peaceful day. Stereo sounds of the great classics fill the rooms.

So we hurried to take the funicular to the top of Flöyen—Edvard Grieg’s mountain—to view the magnificent scenery, overlooking the city and its fjord, the Vaagen, and the islands spreading out like dark gems on a silver platter ocean of glassy water. As we exited from the funicular at the top of the mountain, von Braun stopped for a moment in front of a tall granite monument, erected in honor of the Bergen youths who gave their lives in the war against the German occupation forces some three decades ago. I translated the inscriptions on the bronze plaque bolted to the side of the monument.

Slowly, he turned around and inhaled the stunning view of the city, the fjord, the islands and the splendor of it all. Then he said, "You know, if this had been my country, I certainly would have defended it myself against any aggressors and invaders." The shifts in his angle of vision provide continuous suspense.

We have spent a lot of time together since our first contact in 1950. I believe it is correct to say that we hit it off famously from the start. We’ve gone through quick chats at meetings and presentations, and long, satisfying discussions far into the night—relating experiences, plotting and figuring out ways to get the message across, how to get the money and backing for a realistic space program, how to counter negativists, the excusers and non-doers, the critics who were blind to the forest while they continued to hack away at the individual trees.

Von Braun, physically and mentally, is a big man. He has a frank, boyish, open face, given to quick smiles and wide grins. While speaking, he looks at you directly. He is intent on communicating his thoughts as completely and correctly as possible. When he listens it is just as intently, his eyes searching your face for nuances of expression. He registers every word spoken. He is a man’s man and enjoys men’s humor. His speech sparkles with witticisms and humorous analogies. He loves and quotes stories from his five decades of reading, dreaming and working on rockets.

Von Braun tackles projects wholeheartedly. Whatever the job, his approach is positive and thorough. His thoughts—Let’s get it done. What is the scope? What are the main problems? How can they most logically be attacked? How best to split up the tasks among the team? What’s a realistic development plan and time schedule? He is a man of action: confident, dynamic and courageous—a doer. Yet withal, he is sensitive to the political problems when they arise—and in the rocket and space business there have always been politics, interservice, interagency and, recently, interparty rivalry. He is a brilliant tactician and knows how to present a technical case with logic and impact.

Long-time friend and associate Frederick C. Durant lll says of him:

"When von Braun enters a meeting, his confidence and enthusiasm pervade the room. His inherent common sense and good humor are infectious and seldom fail to have a salutary effect upon a conference. Even when the topic is one of unexpected developmental problems or test failures, the meeting will usually end with renewed confidence and plans of attack upon the apparent elements underlying the trouble.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to introduce von Braun to numerous people of widely diverse backgrounds—editors, physicists, the military, Madison Avenue types and businessmen, large and small. Again and again, I have seen von Braun’s personality work magic on opinionated individuals who had preconceived notions and erroneous impressions of von Braun himself, his projects and accomplishments. It is human nature, I suppose, to be suspect and a little envious of someone who had been a wartime enemy and who has had subsequent widespread publicity in a technology as yeasty as rockets and space flight. But over and over I’ve watched these opinions change, usually within a few minutes of a first meeting, as von Braun’s personal warmth, and engaging manner and obvious honesty are communicated as if by a sixth sense.

In Amsterdam, during the Ninth International Astronautical Federation Congress in 1958, I arranged to get von Braun together with Professor Leonid I. Sedov, chairman of the commission for the space flight programs within the U.S.S.R. Von Braun had supported the concept of international cooperation since the earliest days. This was the first time it had been feasible for him to attend an IAF Congress. It seemed fitting that von Braun and Sedov should meet for an informal discussion. With their common interests they got along perfectly. Sedov spoke quite adequate German, so language was no barrier. I recall their discussions of the legality of claims upon, and control of, extraterrestrial territory such as the Moon. Von Braun put his finger on the practical aspects. He suggested, and Sedov concurred, that if Russian and U.S. space travelers were to land on the Moon at about the same time, politics would play absolutely no role in conduct whatever. Rather, both groups would band together for mutual assistance and survival in an immensely hostile environment, much as would Arctic explorers in earlier days when survival was questionable. At this time, the cold war between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. was at its peak.

Von Braun’s character is impeccable. Thus, the reader should not look for reports of frivolous living, scandalous material, sudsy stories of shady affairs, excessive drinking, under-the-table wheelings and dealings in government contracts and the like. They don’t exist. Attempts have been made to attack him with slander of different sorts, as we shall see in later chapters. But they never resulted in anything but thin air.

Few have had the opportunity to share the thrills of the challenging assignment of sending rockets into space—to other worlds. But von Braun also has strained his eyes toward the Moon and the planets in an agony of disillusion, of bitter disappointment—because he wanted to go there, and he was capable of doing so, yet someone else did go before him. Against his will, with a kind of miserable fascination his gaze has oftentimes moved across the nothing between Earth and Moon, and he has been thinking about the almost unbelievable shortsightedness of man, of the unwise rules and regulations and restrictions in any society, that so often have hampered explorers.

But many years ago, as a young boy, when he was roaming in the woods of the Silesian slopes, and when at night he stopped to look at the Moon, his explorer mind was thinking clearly and enthusiastically—and he whispered back to the wind that rushed through the majestic pines that one day—some day—he was going to do it. He was going to fly there in a rocket ship. When the twilight darkened, day after day, and the silvery Moon reflected its flames in the river, and when the stars were shining brightly over the hills, then the boy’s mind worked at its best. These strange thoughts—so immensely strong–shaped the mind of one of the century’s most outstanding young men—who, at the age of forty-six, hurled into space the free world’s first artificial satellite.

The adventure of exploration always has dictated his moves. They have been daring, farsighted and, at times, rather dangerous. But they were always thoroughly planned. They were sound engineering ideas—and for the most part they were completely successful.

On one occasion, in the summer of 1955, when I had dinner in the von Braun home at Huntsville, Alabama, for the first time, we spent that evening discussing his famous Marsprojekt. Turning the now yellow pages of his original manuscript with an almost religious passion, he said, You know, Erik, no wonder people thought I was crazy back in those days [1947] talking about a manned expedition to Mars. I can see that now. What makes me so mad is that they still think we’re crazy! I bet you we’ll have probes in orbit around the Sun and out to the planets by 1960.

Russia’s first rocket to orbit the Sun was launched on January 2, 1959; von Braun's followed two months later, on March 3.

In von Braun’s opinion there can be no doubt that the Soviet regards space in the same way that Great Britain regarded the seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To rule the world, he says, Russia knows that she must dominate space as totally as England, in her day, dominated the seas. All the choice left to us is to accept the Soviet challenge or pay the piper.

During the fifties, many people thought of von Braun as some sort of science fiction hero who for the most part was dreaming of big space conquests and who spent most of his time on Walt Disney television shows. To his teammates von Braun is possibly the greatest practicing engineer alive. Hardly a day would go by in the early days without von Braun taking time out to walk over to the development laboratories at Redstone Arsenal to look at things in order to get a feel for what kind of progress was being made. He would notice some new device on a test bench and ask a few questions of the project engineer. He then would stand there quietly for a few seconds before he would say, It appears to me that we can save time and money if we modify a unit for this purpose which I saw on a recent industrial exhibit. I’ll send you some reference material when I get back to the office. Why don’t you look into the matter and let me know? Usually, in a few days a new purchase order would be issued.

His engineering know-how is almost frightening at times. There are so many excellent rocket engineers, but there are few excellent rocket engineers who also are professionally competent in dozens and dozens of other technological fields.

Von Braun, says German-born rocketeer Rolf Engel, joins technical ability, passionate optimism, immense experience and uncanny organizing ability . . . He is the greatest human element behind today’s rocketry success. Another von Braun teamster says, From Wernher, you get a feeling of the orderliness of things, what it is possible for the human mind to be and do. But this orderliness is not that of a bookkeeper, it is that of a great poet!

But there are those who are less bemused by the von Braun glitter. To some, his switch of loyalty from Nazi Germany to the United States seemed unnaturally quick and easy. Dr. Paul Schroeder, a German mathematician who worked with von Braun on the V-2 project, is said to accuse him of being an opportunist who picked the brains of better men and grabbed credit others should have had. Also, for Schroeder and a few other scientists, there has always been too much of the huckster in von Braun, too little of the pomp that a proper high priest of science should display. Of himself, von Braun admits, I have to be a two-headed monster—scientist and public relations man.

A radio and television commentator once proudly told me he had completed a full-hour film roundup program of the nation’s missile and space efforts. The most wonderful thing I accomplished, he said, was to manage to do a full-hour program without even mentioning von Braun or any of the Germans at Huntsville!

All of the German nationals from Peenemünde were, to a greater or lesser extent, space-flight enthusiasts. None was more so than von Braun. As their leader he was singled out as the focus of reaction and resistance from a wide variety of minority groups of different classifications. These groups made known their bitterness and antagonisms in many ways—direct or indirect. The basis for some of these feelings were in many cases understandable—arising from normal and accepted human emotions. Envy, pride and jealousy were displayed; even stubborn ignorance was occasionally evident. Some of the strongest opponents of von Braun’s continuing fight for recognition of the feasibility of space flight were motivated by two or more reasons.

Professional nationalism has been a strong motive. Why should von Braun, ’a second-class citizen,’ be looked to for advice and guidance in rocketry? Was there not an American rocket program? Were not our own rocket engineers and scientists as well or better informed and more competent? After all, who won the war? The blunt answer is that the U.S. did not have rocket engineers and scientists of equal competence and experience. Decades of hard effort, of trial and error, the experience of depressing failures and stimulating success had instilled in the von Braun team a maturity of judgment, or a sense of wisdom, that was simply not appreciated or understood by the great majority of American rocketeers or by the military planners in charge of U.S. postwar missile projects.

A similar national prejudice was based upon the U.S. heritage, never fully appreciative of the work and contributions of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, Father of American Rocketry. Charges were made that the Germans had simply stolen Dr. Goddard’s ideas and patents without credit.

A resistance against consideration of space exploration as worthy of national effort also played a part. This attitude was stubbornly adhered to by many of the U.S.’s top scientists. This myopic prejudice has largely disappeared but still has adherents among the hierarchy of high priests of American science and in an alarmingly large number of national scientific institutions and universities. In slowly giving ground, some of the most outspoken scientists who had previously been fort-diggers and obstructionists have maneuvered themselves into political positions where they now can conveniently forget—or at least rationalize—their earlier un-imaginative attitudes.

Von Braun’s sincerity has been bitterly attacked. Look at this von Braun, says one of his most violent critics. He is the man who lost the war for Hitler. His V-2 was a great engineering achievement, but it had almost no military effect, and it drained German brains and material from more practical weapons. Von Braun has always wanted to be the Columbus of space. He was thinking of space flight, not weapons, and he is trying to sell the United States a space-flight project disguised as a means of dominating the world.

Von Braun had to counter each element of this opposition, singly or in concert, directly or indirectly. In the first ten years of his life in the U.S. he was not a citizen. His movements were to some extent restricted. A majority of his most outspoken opponents had never met him. On the occasions where they did meet face to face, von Braun’s personal charm and human warmth have strengthened the impact of his technical arguments—usually converting the opposition. Since he obtained his citizenship in 1955 he has traveled widely and spoken publicly on hundreds of occasions. The solid success of the Explorer I satellite launching, the Redstone, Jupiter and Pershing ballistic missiles and the Saturn-powered manned space projects under his supervision have done much to awaken his opponents. It is only fair to mention that some of his earlier most outspoken critics, if not active boosters, will now admit at least grudging admiration.

Dr. Walter R. Dornberger, Peenemünde’s father, says that von Braun’s imagination in those days knew no bounds. "He often regarded as an established fact something his perpetually laboring spirit wished to be true. He reveled in any project that promised to be on a gigantic scale, and, usually, in the distant future. I had to brake him back to hard facts and the everyday. I had to force him to go more deeply into things, to concentrate more, especially on questions of detail.

"I knew that as soon as he really applied himself intensively to all the technical questions his indisputable genius would find the right answer. He had an almost incredible gift for retaining out of a profusion of scientific data, literature, discussions and visits to factories, the one important point that concerned our work; for seizing upon it, developing it in his mind and putting it into action at the right spot. He forgot or dismissed everything else from his thoughts as useless lumber.

"He was erratic at first and not completely persistent. He would go from one thing