edgar-mitchell

Sea of Sky 43
reputation that preceded him. As it turned out, von Braun was a peacefulminded
man intimately concerned with the manner in which we would
explore the cosmos, and he was leading the team that would build the
launch machinery to take us there. He was also singularly passionate about
his work. I came to learn that much of the lore surrounding von Braun
was merely misinformed gossip. Many saw him as a thinly disguised and
secretly unrepentant Nazi employed by the U.S. government, not the brilliant
engineer who, as a young man, had his talents exploited by a totalitarian
regime.
His life was larger, more dramatic than I thought possible. It was
Wagnerian, operatic. While still a teenager, von Braun began his career in
rocketry building the German Repulsor rocket for the legendary Hermann
Oberth. As Hitler and his Brown Shirts came to power, von Braun’s small
group of engineers found financial backing in the Third Reich for their
wild dream of one day sending men into outer space to explore the cosmos.
During the war years, their designs for the A-1 and A-2 rockets (renamed
the V-I and V-2 by Hitler himself) evolved light-years ahead of their
counterparts in the Soviet Union and the United States. (American designs
were under the auspices of the brilliant but reclusive Robert Goddard
in New Mexico.) The V-1 and V-2 rockets weren’t effective militarily, as
they couldn’t carry a large payload of explosives, and weren’t especially
accurate. Moreover, production was peculiarly slow, which drew the
suspicion of the military men. Finally, on March 15, 1944, von Braun
was arrested by the S.S. and accused of sabotaging the rocket program. When
asked how he had sabotaged it, the S.S. officer claimed that von Braun had
been building rockets for the purpose of space travel all along, not warmaking.
But von Braun’s boss, Walter Dornberger, insisted that such work did
not constitute sabotage, and gradually the S.S. gave up its case against the
young engineer. All of this was eventually neither here nor there, as von Braun
and his team began actively—but secretly—seeking out the advancing American
forces, rather than surrender to the Soviets coming from the East.
When they finally achieved their objective, just before the close of the
war, von Braun was sent to the States, to White Sands Proving Grounds in
New Mexico, not far from my hometown of Roswell. In the years succeeding
the war, he expressed his wish to build his huge A-9 and A-10
rockets, which had been on his personal drawing board for years. He believed
these immense rockets would be capable of sending large payloads,
and men, into space. But, of course, the U.S. military wasn’t interested,
just as his former military bosses were not. What they wanted was a marriage
between the two great military technologies that had come out of
World War II—the rocket engine and the atomic bomb. They wanted ICBMs
for a cold war. Space exploration would have to wait.