The film portrays von Braun's progression from boyhood, through his missile work in Nazi Germany, to his later missile development for the U.S. Army, ending with the first successful launch of an American space satellite. It begins in the early 1920s with a juvenile von Braun wrecking a neighbour's greenhouse with a wayward rocket launch, prefiguring his future wartime destruction. A policeman complains to Wernher's parents and his father offers to pay for the damage. Von Braun is next seen as a young engineer in the early 1930s intrigued by the possibility of space travel at the
Space Rocket Society where he performs an experimental rocket engine
static test. In the background, Captain
Walter Dornberger talks to rocket pioneer
Hermann Oberth about von Braun and suggests to rocketeer Anton Reger that the army could provide necessary equipment and facilities for such costly rocket experiments and development. Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's
V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes. Upon Germany's defeat, von Braun and his team surrender to American forces and are taken to the United States as part of
Operation Paperclip. The film recounts his efforts at the
White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico and at the
Redstone Arsenal in
Huntsville, Alabama developing missiles for the U.S. Army. The story concludes with von Braun's contributions to launching the first American orbital satellite,
Explorer1, in January 1958, four months after his painful disappointment at the earlier pioneering
Sputnik satellite launch by the Soviet Union.
I Aim at the Stars wrestles with the ethical complexities of scientific progress and the personal life of von Braun. It highlights the disquieting paradox of a man who aimed for the stars but whose inventions caused immense destruction on Earth. The film is entirely silent about the brutal use of
concentration camp slave labour and the harsh conditions which killed thousands of workers during the production of von Braun's missiles during the war. ==Cast==