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78 SMITHSONIAN ANNALS OF FLIGHT It was that little Opel again that helped make history, for as Wernher wrote in the British Interplanetary Society Journal: Early one beautiful July morning in 1932 we loaded our two available motor cars and set out for Kummersdorf which lay some 60 miles south of Berlin. As the clock struck five, our leading car with a launching rack containing the silverpainted Mirak II atop and followed by its companion vehicle [the Opel] bearing liquid oxygen, petrol and tools, encountered Captain Dornberger at the rendezvous in the forests south of Berlin." The successful launching of Mirak II convinced the German Ordnance Department of the feasibility of the rocket as a missile as well as progenitor for space travel. Although our early experiments were unrefined in the face of today's sophisticated methods, the very high g's over the many minutes of exposure produced for the first time scientific evidence as to what damage one might expect to unprotected living organisms. I noted cases of cerebral hemor- FIGURE 3.—Wernher von Braun and Constantine Generales, on a pleasure trip to Greece in 1931, photographed in the Saint Gotthard Pass, where the author's Opel became overheated and chunks of snow and ice had to be used to cool the motor. Upon our return, because I was to be in Paris, the car was left in Wernher's care for the use of the Raketenflugplatz experts—to further the cause of rocket research. Shortly after my return from Paris I painted the Opel red. Subsequently it was stolen while I was visiting my parents in the United States. rhage, pulmonary stelectasis, hemothorax, avulsion or dislocation of the eyeballs, and so on. To the green mind of this inquisitive and experimenting student, thoughts of presenting a paper disclosing these pathological findings, so completely unrelated to any orthodox discipline in the accepted medical curriculum of those days, never occurred. Finally, in June 1960, the results of these original investigations first appeared in a medical journal. 8 Indeed, according to Dr. von Braun, it took 20 years for researchers in this and other countries to verify these results, and it wasn't until 1958 that I had an opportunity to present to Wernher several tissue slides of the mice as a memento of our early work (see Figure 4). Edward Diamond, senior editor of Newsweek, quoted Dr. von Braun as follows: This was probably the first experiment in space medicine. The Air Force has probably spent $7 million to find out what we learned. 9 In 1959 I proposed to the NASA, and in 1962 to the U.S. Air Force, a centrifugal space-vehicle simulator or Biocyclothanathron (Figure 5), to simulate, on the ground, the many unique properties of space flight. 10 Many of today's centrifugal facilities have subsequently incorporated certain features of the Biocyclothanathron. It is of interest to note that in 1931, the same year our space-minded biomedical experiments were being performed, Karl Jansky was studying peculiar static noises from outer-space which gave birth to the new science of radio astronomy; Wiley Post was successfully completing the first roundthe-world flight in his monoplane "Winnie Mae"; and an enthusiastic crowd, including von Braun and the author, was greeting Auguste Piccard in front of the Baur au Lac Hotel at Zurich, following his first stratospheric flight, on 27 May with Charles Knipfer, to 51,753 feet (15,786.5 m.), from Augsburg, Germany, to Glazier, Austria. Incidentally, the Zurich-Paris research antedated my first flight experience in an airplane by two years. Thinking of this always reminds me of the quotation of Dr. M. P. Lansberg of Holland: Space flight is indeed many centuries the senior of aviation, consequently, it was space medicine that preceded aviation medicine and not vice-versa.n
FIGURE 4.—Presentation by Dr. Constantine Generales to Dr. Wernher von Braun of the first biomedical-histopathological tissue slides from the mice used in their early experiments. Presentation took place during a testimonial dinner honoring Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun, 15 May 1958, New York City. FIGURE 5.—The Biocyclothanathron, or cosmic vehicle simulator, conceived by the author and designed for him by the consulting engineering firm of McKiernan and Terry Corporation, Dover, New Jersey.
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NUMBER 10 159 FIGURE 2.—Ludvik Oc
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NUMBER 10 163 FICURE 6.—a, Launch
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