Country: Germany
Birth: 1912 (Poland) / Death: 1977 (United States)
Biography:
A German (and later American) rocket engineer who made pioneering contributions to the development of rocket technology in Germany and is considered the founding father of space rocket technology in the United States. Von Braun was born in the Polish town of Wierzczyk to an aristocratic family. He was the middle son of three children in his family, as his father was a government employee and later became Minister of Agriculture in the Weimar Republic. He was captivated by the possibility of space travel, which he read about in science fiction books as a child, and then sought to master calculus and trigonometry to become able to understand the physics of rocket science. In 1925, Braun joined the boarding school in the city of Ettersberg, near the city of Weimar, where he spent three years until his parents transferred him to the Hermann Leitz boarding school in 1928, the year in which he joined the German Society for Space Travel (VFR). In his early days in Germany, he worked in car repair, and in an effort to fulfill his desire to build large rockets capable of traveling into space, Braun joined the German army in 1932 to contribute to the development of rockets that operate on liquid fuel.
Thanks to research funded by the German army, Braun obtained his doctorate in 1934. Braun showed unique ingenuity in working on jet engines. He moved to the V2 rocket project in 1937 and became project manager in 1940, remaining in his position until the end of World War II. The V2 ballistic missile is known to be the predecessor of American and Soviet intercontinental missiles and space launch rockets. After the end of the war, von Braun was not punished by the Allies, but his previous activities were overlooked. He traveled secretly to the United States with about 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians as part of Operation Paperclip, where he worked in the United States on the medium-range ballistic missile program, through which he developed the rocket with which the United States launched its first satellite (Explorer 1). He then moved with his group to NASA to be appointed director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center at that time, where von Braun worked as chief engineer of the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 crew to the moon.
Awards and Honors:
-1975: US National Medal of Science.
-1944: War Merit Cross from Nazi Germany.
In 1955, Disney aired a series of educational films, Man in Space, that discussed the possible future of space travel. This particular example is very interesting, as we can see that Dr. von Braun had a design ready for a large launch vehicle. Remember that in 1955, there were no humans or man-made objects in space. This was two years before the Russian Sputnik satellite was launched in 1957.
References: (Wikipedia.com)، (rt.arabic.com)، (nasa.gov)، (nasainarabic.net).
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