U.S. Army career 's Special Committee on Space Technology, 1958 On 20 June 1945,
U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. approved the transfer of von Braun and his specialists to the United States as one of his last acts in office. This was announced to the public on 1 October 1945. In September 1945, von Braun and other members of the Peenemünde team signed a work contract with the
United States Army Ordnance Corps. On 20 September 1945, the first seven technicians arrived in the United States at
New Castle Army Air Field, just south of Wilmington, Delaware. They were then flown to Boston, Massachusetts, and taken by boat to the
Army Intelligence Service post at
Fort Strong in Boston Harbor. Later, with the exception of von Braun, the men were transferred to
Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to sort out the Peenemünde documents, enabling the scientists to continue their rocketry experiments. Finally, von Braun and his remaining Peenemünde staff (see
List of German rocket scientists in the United States) were transferred to their new home at
Fort Bliss, a large Army installation just north of El Paso, Texas. Von Braun later wrote that he found it hard to develop a "genuine emotional attachment" to his new surroundings. His chief design engineer Walther Reidel became the subject of a December 1946 article, "German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken", exposing the presence of von Braun's team in the country and drawing criticism from
Albert Einstein and
John Dingell. von Braun led the Army's rocket development team at
Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the
Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live
nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States. He personally witnessed this historic launch and detonation. Work on the Redstone led to the development of the first high-precision inertial guidance system on the Redstone rocket. By 1953 von Braun's title was, "Chief, Guided Missiles Development Division, Redstone Arsenal." As director of the Development Operations Division of the
Army Ballistic Missile Agency, von Braun, with his team, then developed the
Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone rocket. The Jupiter-C was the basis for the
Juno I rocket that successfully launched the West's first satellite,
Explorer 1, on 31 January 1958. This event signaled the birth of America's space program.
Popular concepts for a human presence in space Repeating the pattern he had established during his earlier career in Germany, von Braun – while directing military rocket development in the real world – continued to entertain his engineer-scientist's dream of a future in which rockets would be used for
space exploration. However, he was no longer at risk of being fired. As American public opinion of Germans began to recover, von Braun found himself increasingly in a position to popularize his ideas. The 14 May 1950 headline of
The Huntsville Times ("Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon") might have marked the beginning of these efforts. Von Braun's ideas rode a publicity wave that was created by science fiction movies and stories. The space station (to be constructed using rockets with recoverable and reusable ascent stages) was a
toroid structure, with a diameter of ; this built on the concept of a
rotating wheel-shaped station introduced in 1929 by
Herman Potočnik in his book
The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor. The space station spun around a central docking nave to provide
artificial gravity, and was assembled in a two-hour, high-inclination
Earth orbit allowing observation of essentially every point on Earth on at least a daily basis. The ultimate purpose of the space station was to provide an assembly platform for crewed
lunar expeditions. More than a decade later, the movie version of
2001: A Space Odyssey drew heavily on the design concept in its visualization of an orbital space station. Von Braun envisioned these expeditions as very large-scale undertakings, with a total of 50 astronauts traveling in three huge spacecraft (two for crew, one primarily for cargo), each long and in diameter and driven by a rectangular array of 30 rocket propulsion engines. Upon arrival, astronauts would establish a
permanent lunar base in the
Sinus Roris region by using the emptied cargo holds of their craft as shelters, and would explore their surroundings for eight weeks. This would include a expedition in pressurized rovers to the crater
Harpalus and the
Mare Imbrium foothills. and von Braun, seen in 1954 holding a model of his passenger ship, collaborated on a series of three educational films. Before technically formalizing his thoughts on human
spaceflight to Mars, von Braun had written a science fiction novel on the subject, set in the year 1980. However, 18 publishers rejected the manuscript. Von Braun later published small portions of this opus in magazines, to illustrate selected aspects of his Mars project popularizations. The complete manuscript, titled
Project Mars: A Technical Tale, did not appear as a printed book until December 2006. In the hope that its involvement would bring about greater public interest in the future of the space program, von Braun also began working with
Walt Disney and the
Disney studios as a technical director, initially for three television films about space exploration. The initial broadcast devoted to space exploration was
Man in Space, which first went on air on 9 March 1955, drawing 40 million viewers. Later (in 1959) von Braun published a short booklet, condensed from episodes that had appeared in
This Week Magazine beforedescribing his updated concept of the first crewed lunar landing. The scenario included only a single and relatively small spacecrafta winged lander with a crew of only two experienced pilots who had already circumnavigated the Moon on an earlier mission. The brute-force
direct ascent flight schedule used a rocket design with five sequential stages, loosely based on the
Nova designs that were under discussion at this time. After a night launch from a Pacific island, the first three stages brought the spacecraft (with the two remaining upper stages attached) to terrestrial
escape velocity, with each burn creating an acceleration of 8–9 times
standard gravity. The residual propellant in the third stage was used for the deceleration intended to commence only a few hundred kilometers above the landing site in a crater near the lunar north pole. The fourth stage provided acceleration to lunar escape velocity, and the fifth stage was responsible for a deceleration during return to the Earth to a residual speed that allows
aerocapture of the spacecraft ending in a runway landing, much in the way of the
Space Shuttle. One remarkable feature of this technical tale is that the engineer von Braun anticipated a medical phenomenon that became apparent only years later: being a veteran astronaut with no history of serious adverse reactions to
weightlessness offers no protection against becoming unexpectedly and violently
spacesick.
Religious conversion In the first half of his life, von Braun was a nonpracticing, perfunctory
Lutheran. As described by
Ernst Stuhlinger and
Frederick I. Ordway III: "Throughout his younger years, von Braun did not show signs of religious devotion, or even an interest in things related to the church or to biblical teachings. In fact, he was known to his friends as a 'merry heathen' (
fröhlicher Heide)." Nevertheless, in 1945 he explained his decision to surrender to the Western Allies, rather than Russians, as being influenced by a desire to share rocket technology with people whom he felt followed the Bible. In 1946, In an unnamed religious magazine he stated: On the motives behind this conversion, Michael J. Neufeld is of the opinion that he turned to religion "to pacify his own conscience", and University of Southampton scholar Kendrick Oliver said that von Braun was presumably moved "by a desire to find a new direction for his life after the moral chaos of his service for the Third Reich". Having "concluded one bad bargain with the Devil, perhaps now he felt a need to have God securely at his side". At a
Gideons conference in 2004, W. Albert Wilson, a former pilot and NASA employee, stated that he had talked with von Braun about the Christian faith while von Braun was working for NASA, and believed that conversation had been instrumental in von Braun's conversion. Later in life, he joined an
Episcopal congregation, He publicly spoke and wrote about the complementarity of science and religion, the afterlife of the soul, and his belief in God. He stated, "Through science man strives to learn more of the mysteries of creation. Through religion he seeks to know the Creator." He was interviewed by the
Assemblies of God pastor C. M. Ward and stated that "The farther we probe into space, the greater my faith." In addition, he met privately with evangelist
Billy Graham and with the civil rights leader
Martin Luther King Jr. Concepts for orbital warfare Von Braun developed and published his space station concept during the time of the
Cold War when the U.S. government put the containment of the Soviet Union above everything else. The fact that his space station – if armed with missiles that could be easily adapted from those already available at this time – would give the United States space superiority in both orbital and
orbit-to-ground warfare did not escape him. In his popular writings, von Braun elaborated on them in several of his books and articles, but he took care to qualify such military applications as "particularly dreadful". This much-less-peaceful aspect of von Braun's "drive for space" has been reviewed by Michael J. Neufeld from the Space History Division of the
National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
NASA career The U.S. Navy had been tasked with building a rocket to lift satellites into orbit, but the resulting
Vanguard rocket launch system was unreliable. In 1957, with the launch of
Sputnik 1, a belief grew within the United States that it lagged behind the Soviet Union in the emerging
Space Race. American authorities then chose to use von Braun and his German team's experience with missiles to create an orbital launch vehicle. Von Braun had originally proposed such an idea in 1954, but it was denied at the time. Von Braun became the center's first director on 1 July 1960 and held the position until 27 January 1970. Von Braun's early years at NASA included a failed "
4 inch mission." On 21 November 1960, the first uncrewed
Mercury-Redstone rocket rose up a mere 4 inches before settling back down onto the launch pad. The unfortunate and untimely failure of the rocket launch created a "nadir of morale in Project Mercury." The launch failure was later determined to be the result of a "power plug with one prong shorter than the other because a worker failed it to make it fit." Because of the difference in the length of one prong, the launch system detected the difference in the power disconnection as a "cut-off signal to the engine." The safety system in fact stopped the launch. After the success of the
Mercury-Redstone 2 mission in January 1961, a mere 2 months after the failed "4 inch mission," NASA morale was improved. Still, a new string of problems emerged. Von Braun insisted on one more test before the Redstone could be deemed man-rated. His overly cautious nature brought about clashes with other people involved in the program, who argued that MR-2's technical issues were simple and had been resolved shortly after the flight. He overruled them, so a test mission involving a Redstone on a boilerplate capsule was flown successfully in March. Von Braun's stubbornness was blamed for the inability of the U.S. to launch a crewed space mission before the Soviet Union, which ended up putting the first man in space the following month. Three weeks later on 5 May, von Braun's team successfully launched
Alan Shepard into space. He named his
Mercury-Redstone 3 Freedom 7. The Marshall Center's first major program was the development of
Saturn rockets to carry heavy
payloads into and beyond Earth orbit. From this, the
Apollo program for crewed Moon flights was developed. Von Braun initially pushed for a flight engineering concept that called for an
Earth orbit rendezvous technique (the approach he had argued for building his space station), but in 1962, he converted to the
lunar orbit rendezvous concept that was subsequently realized. During Apollo, he worked closely with former Peenemünde teammate,
Kurt H. Debus, the first director of the
Kennedy Space Center. His dream to help mankind set foot on the Moon became a reality on 16 July 1969, when a Marshall-developed
Saturn V rocket launched the crew of
Apollo 11 on its historic eight-day mission. Over the course of the program, Saturn V rockets enabled six teams of astronauts to reach the surface of the Moon. During the late 1960s, von Braun was instrumental in the development of the
U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville. The desk from which he guided America's entry into the Space Race remains on display there. He also was instrumental in the launching of the experimental
Applications Technology Satellite. He traveled to India and hoped that the program would be helpful in bringing a massive educational television project to help the poorest people in that country. at Redstone Arsenal in 1963; President Kennedy was the initiator of the American lunar program in 1961, and von Braun was appointed its technical director. During the local summer of 1966–67, von Braun participated in a field trip to Antarctica, organized for him and several other members of top NASA management. The goal of the field trip was to determine whether the experience gained by the U.S. scientific and technological community during the exploration of Antarctic wastelands would be useful for the crewed exploration of space. Von Braun was mainly interested in the management of the scientific effort on Antarctic research stations, logistics, habitation, and life support, and in using the barren Antarctic terrain like the glacial dry valleys to test the equipment that one day was used to look for signs of life on Mars and other worlds. In an internal memo dated 16 January 1969, von Braun had confirmed to his staff that he would stay on as a center director at Huntsville to head the
Apollo Applications Program. He referred to this time as a moment in his life when he felt the strong need to pray, stating "I certainly prayed a lot before and during the crucial Apollo flights". A few months later, on the occasion of the first Moon landing, he publicly expressed his optimism that the Saturn V carrier system would continue to be developed, advocating human missions to Mars in the 1980s. Nonetheless, on 1 March 1970, von Braun and his family relocated to
Washington, D.C., when he was assigned the post of NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning at NASA Headquarters. After a series of conflicts associated with the truncation of the Apollo program, and facing severe budget constraints, von Braun retired from NASA on 26 May 1972. Not only had it become evident by this time that NASA and his visions for future U.S. space flight projects were incompatible, but also it was perhaps even more frustrating for him to see popular support for a continued presence of man in space wane dramatically once the goal to reach the Moon had been accomplished. Von Braun also developed the idea of a
Space Camp that would train children in fields of science and space technologies, as well as help their mental development much the same way sports camps aim at improving physical development. Von Braun helped establish and promote the
National Space Institute, a precursor of the present-day
National Space Society, in 1975, and became its first president and chairman. In 1976, he became a scientific consultant to
Lutz Kayser, the CEO of
OTRAG, and a member of the
Daimler-Benz board of directors. However, his deteriorating health forced him to retire from Fairchild on 31 December 1976. When the 1975
National Medal of Science was awarded to him in early 1977, he had been hospitalized, and was unable to attend the White House ceremony. ==Engineering philosophy==