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Wernher von Braun was born on 23 March 1912, in the small town of Wirsitz in the Province of Posen, Kingdom of Prussia, then German Empire and now Poland. [14]His father, Magnus Freiherr von Braun (1878–1972), was a civil servant and conservative politician; he served as Minister of Agriculture in the federal government during the Weimar Republic.
The largest production model of the Saturn family of rockets, the Saturn V was designed under the direction of Wernher von Braun at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; the lead contractors for construction of the rocket were Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft Company, and IBM. Fifteen flight-capable vehicles ...
[a] The first successful large-scale rocket programs were initiated in Nazi Germany by Wernher von Braun. The Soviet Union took the lead in the post-war Space Race, launching the first satellite, [1] the first animal, [2]: 155 the first human [3] and the first woman [4] into orbit. The United States landed the first men on the Moon in 1969 ...
— Wernher von Braun to Houbolt upon the successful landing of Apollo 11, a remark captured on a NASA film taken at Mission Control in Houston. If Houbolt had not pushed the LOR concept—risking his NASA career and professional reputation—it would have been unlikely that the first successful lunar landing and return mission could have been ...
Before the Apollo program began, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket engineers had started work on plans for very large launch vehicles, the Saturn series, and the even larger Nova series. In the midst of these plans, von Braun was transferred from the Army to NASA and was made Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Von Braun proposed the Saturn name in October 1958 as a logical successor to the Jupiter series as well as the Roman god's powerful position. [ 1 ] In 1963, President John F. Kennedy identified the Saturn I SA-5 launch as being the point where US lift capability would surpass the Soviets , after having been behind since Sputnik .
I Aim at the Stars is a 1960 West German-American biographical film which tells the story of the life of Wernher von Braun.The film covers his life from his early days in Germany, through Peenemünde, until his work with the U.S. Army, NASA, and the American space program.
When Shea first began to consider the issue in 1962, most NASA engineers and managers—including Wernher von Braun, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center—favored either an approach called direct ascent, where the Apollo spacecraft would land on the Moon and return to the Earth as one unit, or Earth orbit rendezvous, where the ...