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KF5JRV > TODAY 21.10.18 13:21l 73 Lines 3948 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 23437_KF5JRV
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Subj: Today in History - Oct 21
Path: IW8PGT<IZ3LSV<IK6ZDE<VE2PKT<N9PMO<NS2B<AB0AF<KF5JRV
Sent: 181021/1215Z 23437@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQ6.0.16
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order transferring the
brilliant rocket designer Wernher von Braun and his team from the U.S.
Army to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA). Von Braun, the mastermind of the U.S. space program, had
developed the lethal V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany during World War II.
Wernher von Braun was born into an aristocratic German family in 1912.
He became fascinated with rocketry and the possibility of space travel
after reading Hermann Oberth’s The Rocket into Interplanetary Space
(1923) when he was in his early teens. He studied mechanical engineering
and physics in Berlin and in his free time assisted Oberth in his tests
of liquid-fueled rockets. In 1932, Von Braun’s rocket work attracted the
attention of the German army, and he was given a grant to continue his
work. He was eventually hired to lead the army’s rocket artillery unit,
and by 1937 he was the technical director of a large development
facility located at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea.
Von Braun’s rocket tests impressed the Nazi leadership, who provided
generous funding to the program. The most sophisticated rockets produced
at Peenemünde were the long-range ballistic missile A-4 and the
anti-aircraft missile Wasserfall. The A-4 was years ahead of rockets
being produced in other nations at the time. It traveled at 3,600 mph,
was capable of delivering a warhead a distance of more than 200 miles,
and was the first rocket to enter the fringes of space. In 1944, the
Nazis changed the name of A-4 to V-2 and began launching the rockets
against London and Antwerp. The V stood for Vergeltung—the German word
for “vengeanceö—and was an expression of Nazi vindictiveness over the
Allied bombardment of Germany. The V-2s took many lives but came too
late to influence the outcome of the war.
Von Braun and 400 members of his team fled before the advancing Russians
in 1945 and surrendered to the Americans. U.S. troops quickly seized
more than 300 train-car loads of spare V-2 parts, and the German
scientists were taken to the United States, eventually settling at Fort
Bliss, Texas, where they resumed their rocketry work. At first, they
were closely supervised because of their former allegiance to Nazi
Germany, but it soon became apparent that they had fully shifted their
loyalty to America and the great scientific opportunities it provided
for them.
In 1950, von Braun and his team, which now included Americans, were
transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, to head the U.S. Army
ballistic-weapons program. During the 1950s, von Braun enthusiastically
promoted the possibilities of space flight in books and magazines. In
1955, he became a U.S. citizen.
The USSR successfully launched Sputnik—the world’s first artificial
satellite—in October 1957, but von Braun’s team was not far behind with
its launching of the first American satellite—Explorer 1—in January
1958. In July of that year, President Eisenhower signed legislation
establishing NASA, and on October 21 von Braun was formally transferred
to the new agency. Von Braun, however, did not really go anywhere;
NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center was built around von
Braun’s headquarters in Huntsville. In 1960, he was named the Marshall
Center’s first director.
At Huntsville, von Braun oversaw construction of the large Saturn launch
vehicles that kept the United States abreast of Soviet space
achievements in the early and mid 1960s. In the late 1960s, von Braun’s
genius came to the fore in the space race, and the Soviets failed in
their efforts to build intricate booster rockets of the type that put
the first U.S. astronauts into a lunar orbit in 1968. Von Braun’s Saturn
rockets eventually took 27 Americans to the moon, 12 who walked on the
lunar surface. Von Braun retired from NASA in 1972 and died five years
later.
73 de Scott KF5JRV
Pmail: KF5JRV@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA
email: KF5JRV@ICLOUD.COM
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