59 Fun Facts About Wernher Von Braun

Wernher von Braun was the chief architect of which rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon?

Saturn V was test-flown "all-up", with every stage live on its very first launch in 1967, a shortcut von Braun's cautious team at first thought mad. It worked first time.

Which animal rode von Braun's Mercury-Redstone rocket into space in January 1961, three months before any American astronaut?

A chimpanzee named Ham pulled levers on cue through a 16-minute flight that went higher and farther than planned, then calmly shook hands with the commander of the ship that recovered him.

Von Braun's V-2 rocket became the first human-made object to do what?

Reach outer space: a test V-2 fired straight up in 1944 climbed far past the 100 km line, and captured V-2s fired from the American desert were soon filming the Earth from space.

Under which secret program was von Braun brought to the United States after the war?

Operation Paperclip brought roughly 1,600 German specialists to America, and as the stay became permanent the Nazi records of some recruits, von Braun among them, were quietly covered up.

Von Braun's rockets launched which satellite, America's first, in 1958?

Explorer 1 carried James Van Allen's radiation detector, and its odd readings revealed the belts of trapped radiation circling Earth that now bear his name.

Von Braun was the first director of which NASA centre?

Marshall Space Flight Center was born when President Eisenhower transferred von Braun's Army rocket team to NASA, and he ran it for nearly ten years, through the whole race to the Moon.

Von Braun was born in 1912 in Wirsitz, then a German town and now part of which country?

Poland gained the town, now called Wyrzysk, after World War I; von Braun was born there because his father, a Prussian civil servant, was then the district's administrator.

Von Braun's father, an estate-owning Prussian baron, held which cabinet post in Germany's last governments before Hitler?

Minister of Agriculture from June 1932, the baron served chancellors Papen and Schleicher in turn, then left government and public life when Hitler came to power in January 1933.

Which Confirmation gift from his mother did von Braun recall using for an hour or two before bedtime at boarding school?

A telescope, which he said he trained on the stars; astronomy became a passion that never left him.

Which Soviet launch finally won von Braun's Army team permission to put up a satellite of its own?

Sputnik 1 did what his arguments could not: a 1954 plan to orbit a satellite on an Army rocket had been turned down, but five weeks after the Soviet launch his team got the go-ahead.

Whose 1923 book By Rocket into Planetary Space did the teenage von Braun get at boarding school?

Hermann Oberth's book was so dense with equations that the boy, then poor at maths, could not follow a word; he threw himself into the subject and finished school a year early.

Von Braun said his boyhood firework-powered wagon was inspired by the record-setting rocket cars of which German carmaker?

Opel heir Fritz von Opel drove rocket-powered cars to speed records; the boy strapped skyrockets to a coaster wagon, and police held him until his father took him home.

The amateur rocket society von Braun joined in 1930 flew its rockets from a disused ammunition depot in which city?

Berlin's city fathers let the club use the overgrown site, and the army officers who came to watch a launch there in 1932 ended up hiring its young student member.

Why was von Braun's 1934 doctoral thesis on rockets given the dull public title "About Combustion Tests"?

Army secrecy was the reason: the army had paid for his doctorate on condition he worked in secret, and the full thesis on his liquid-fuel rocket engines stayed a classified military document.

Which artillery captain arranged the Ordnance Department grant that started von Braun's army rocket work?

Walter Dornberger ran the army's solid-fuel rocket tests and saw what liquid fuel might do for artillery, so he set the 20-year-old up beside his own test stand and stayed his chief for over a decade.

Norman Davies traced von Braun's career to a 'curious oversight' in which treaty, which left rockets off its list of banned weapons?

Treaty of Versailles limits on Germany's heavy guns said nothing about rockets, and in the late 1920s army ordnance officers seized on the gap to study them as long-range artillery.

In 1937 von Braun's army rocket team moved to Peenemünde, a Baltic coast site built jointly with which other service?

The Luftwaffe kept the western end of the site as its own test field. In 1937 a letter asked the 25-year-old technical director to join the Nazi Party, and he went along, judging that a refusal might damage his career.

Which Nazi leader invited von Braun into the SS in 1940 and had promoted him to major by 1943?

Heinrich Himmler prized the rocket work and kept promoting him; von Braun later claimed he wore the SS uniform only once, but he was seen in it more often as the war went on.

The first A-4 to fly successfully, in 1942, carried the logo of Woman in the Moon, a film by which director?

Fritz Lang's 1929 silent film about a Moon voyage had a real rocket pioneer as its scientific adviser, and the student von Braun was soon that man's assistant on engine tests.

Which American physicist's early rockets did von Braun say "blazed the trail" for modern launchers?

Robert H. Goddard was ridiculed in his own country and written off as a crackpot, yet von Braun said "Goddard was ahead of us all".

After a 1943 colour film of an A-4 launch, an enthusiastic Hitler personally made von Braun what?

A professor: by von Braun's own account, after their talk Hitler strode over, shook his hand and congratulated him as "Professor".

Which country's air force sent hundreds of bombers against Peenemünde one night in August 1943, killing von Braun's engine designer?

Britain's Royal Air Force raid, Operation Hydra, killed engine designer Walter Thiel but spared most of the team; its lasting effect was to push V-2 production into an underground factory.

Hours before the first V-2 struck London in September 1944, another had already hit which newly liberated capital?

Paris was the target of the first two combat V-2s, which both failed after launch; a third struck the city the next morning, and London's first arrived that same evening.

Which Belgian port, vital to Allied supply lines, was hit by even more V-2 rockets than London?

Antwerp was struck by some 1,600 V-2s as Hitler tried to choke the port feeding the Allied armies; one that hit the packed Rex cinema in December 1944 killed 567 people.

The underground factory that built von Braun's V-2 drew its slave labour from which concentration camp?

Mittelbau-Dora prisoners built the rocket in tunnels under brutal conditions that von Braun saw on a dozen or more visits; more people died making the V-2 than it killed as a weapon.

Which Nazi security force jailed von Braun in March 1944 after he was reported for careless talk at a party?

The Gestapo came for him over reported remarks that the war was going badly and that he would rather be building a spaceship; he was freed as too useful to lose.

Which Reichsminister persuaded Hitler to reinstate von Braun after his 1944 arrest?

Albert Speer, the armaments minister, argued the rocket could not be finished without him; in Speer's memoirs Hitler agrees to protect von Braun "as long as he is indispensable".

Where did von Braun have the V-2 blueprints hidden from the SS in the last weeks of the war?

An abandoned iron mine near the Harz mountains held 14 tons of V-2 papers, and the Americans recovered all of it after his team surrendered.

How did von Braun break his arm in March 1945?

In a car crash when his driver fell asleep at the wheel; he insisted on a cast so he could leave hospital, and his arm was still in one when he surrendered to the Americans weeks later.

On 2 May 1945, who cycled up to an American private to say the V-2's inventor wanted to surrender?

His brother Magnus was sent because he spoke some English; he rode down to a sentry of the 44th Infantry Division, and the whole party drove in to surrender the same day.

At which desert proving ground in the American Southwest did von Braun's team help launch captured V-2s?

White Sands launches of captured V-2s became science flights: in 1947 they carried fruit flies and seeds to the edge of space to test cosmic rays, then parachuted the canisters back.

Von Braun's team was first stationed at Fort Bliss, near which Texas city?

El Paso's Fort Bliss was a comedown: the man who had directed thousands of engineers now answered to a young Army major and could not leave the post without a military escort.

Von Braun's Germans at Fort Bliss half-jokingly called themselves "PoPs", which stood for what?

Prisoners of Peace played on prisoners of war: the Germans had come as paid contract workers for the Army, yet could leave the post only with a military escort.

In 1950 von Braun's team moved to which Alabama city, his home for the next 20 years?

Huntsville remade itself as "Rocket City" around his missile and Moon-rocket work, and the civic arena complex it opened in 1975 is called the Von Braun Center.

Von Braun's Jupiter-C was the basis for which rocket that orbited America's first satellite?

Juno I was a Jupiter-C with a live fourth stage; a 1956 test of the three-stage version might itself have orbited the world's first satellite, had the Army been allowed to fuel that top stage.

Von Braun's 1952 magazine series "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" appeared in which publication?

Collier's Weekly ran the series with Chesley Bonestell's paintings, and it led him to Walt Disney: the articles became the basis for television films in which von Braun explained spaceflight himself.

Which shape did von Braun give his 1952 design for a crewed space station?

A wheel, which would spin to give its crew artificial gravity and serve as the assembly point for expeditions to the Moon and Mars.

In the Mars novel von Braun wrote in the late 1940s, the Martians' elected leader bears which title?

Elon is the title of the Martians' elected leader in the novel, which went unpublished for decades; in 2021 readers spotted the echo of Elon Musk's Mars plans and the passage went viral.

Which title did Disney give the first of its 1950s television films made with von Braun?

Man in Space reached some 40 million viewers, mixing cartoons with real engineers, and is credited with bringing the idea of human spaceflight to a mass American audience.

Von Braun's 1947 bride, 18-year-old Maria Luise von Quistorp, was already what relation to him?

First cousin, on his mother's side: he got Army leave to go back to Germany for the wedding, then returned to Fort Bliss with his bride and both his parents.

Brought in without visas, members of von Braun's rocket team became legal US immigrants by briefly crossing into which country?

Mexico: they crossed to the US consulate in Ciudad Juárez for visas and came back in as legal immigrants; von Braun and many of his team were sworn in as citizens together in 1955.

Which space station, developed at von Braun's NASA centre, was built inside a converted Apollo rocket stage?

Skylab was an Apollo upper stage fitted out as an orbiting workshop; damaged during its 1973 launch, it overheated in orbit until a parasol sunshade was rigged to cool it.

The first uncrewed Mercury-Redstone launch attempt rose how far before its engine cut out and it settled back on the pad?

4 inches, perhaps five: a two-prong plug pulled out unevenly and sent a false cut-off signal, so the engine stopped while the escape tower shot off alone and the parachutes spilled out.

Von Braun's insistence on one more Redstone test in 1961 is blamed for letting which cosmonaut reach space before any American?

Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth on 12 April 1961; the extra unmanned Redstone flight in March had used the launch slot that might have sent an American up about three weeks before him.

Which astronaut did von Braun's Mercury-Redstone 3 launch into space on 5 May 1961?

Alan Shepard flew for about 15 minutes in the capsule he named Freedom 7; less than three weeks later President Kennedy asked the country to commit to landing a man on the Moon.

In 1962 von Braun dropped his plan to assemble the Moon ship near Earth in favour of which mission mode?

Lunar orbit rendezvous was pushed for years by Langley engineer John Houbolt against scorn from senior colleagues; von Braun came round to it over his own scheme in 1962, and that July NASA adopted it.

Kurt Debus, who had fired test rockets for von Braun since Peenemünde, became the first director of which NASA centre?

Kennedy Space Center grew out of the firing team von Braun asked Debus to form in the early 1950s; the two worked in tandem through Apollo, one building the rockets and the other launching them.

Which Apollo flight launched on von Braun's Moon rocket was the only landing mission that never reached the lunar surface?

Apollo 13 lost an oxygen tank on the way out and swung round the Moon to come home; the other six crews sent to land all made it, the last in December 1972.

NASA headquarters staff nicknamed von Braun's centre the "Chicago Bridge and Iron Works" because its rockets were what?

Heavily overbuilt was the jibe, with safety margins some thought excessive, but the headquarters engineer who told the story conceded the point that mattered: every one of the rockets worked.

Von Braun's opposition to racial segregation put him in conflict with which Alabama governor?

George Wallace toured the rocket centre in June 1965 with a caravan of editors; von Braun staged a booster test firing, then told the captive crowd that the era belongs to those who shed "the shackles of the past".

After leaving NASA in 1972, von Braun became a vice president at which aerospace company?

Fairchild Industries, of Germantown, Maryland, hired him weeks after he quit a NASA that had cut Apollo short and sidelined his plans for Mars; cancer ended that second career within five years.

Von Braun founded which space advocacy organisation in the mid-1970s to rebuild public support for spaceflight?

National Space Institute was his answer to fading public interest after the Moon landings; in 1987 it merged with the L5 Society to become today's National Space Society.

Which president awarded von Braun the 1975 National Medal of Science, America's highest honour for scientists and engineers?

Gerald Ford's medal capped his American honours; he died of cancer in June 1977, seven years before his SS rank and the camp labour behind his wartime rocket became widely known.

Which 1964 Kubrick film character is usually held to be based at least partly on von Braun?

A satirist also skewered him in a 1965 song, and the 1960 biopic I Aim at the Stars earned the mock subtitle "But Sometimes I Hit London."

Which satirist wrote and performed the 1965 song "Wernher von Braun"?

Tom Lehrer called its line about not caring where the rockets come down his most quoted, and said the rumour that von Braun had sued him for the song's royalties was a myth.

Which 1968 mission put the first crew on von Braun's Moon rocket?

Apollo 8 was only the third launch of the giant rocket, and the second, unmanned, had shaken badly and lost engines; von Braun judged the faults fixed, and three men rode it to the Moon and back.

Which future Bond villain played von Braun in the 1960 biopic I Aim at the Stars?

Curd Jurgens, later Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me, took the role; comedian Mort Sahl is credited with the jibe that the title needed a subtitle, "But Sometimes I Hit London".

Von Braun's 1952 Mars Project lands its first craft on skis on which surface?

Polar ice was the one surface he trusted to be smooth; the crew would then drive 6,500 km by crawler to build a base at the equator. The plan began as the appendix to a novel not printed until 2006.

Which youth programme grew from an idea von Braun put to Alabama's rocket museum?

Space Camp began with his remark to the museum's director in the 1970s that young people needed a science camp of their own; the director opened it a few years after von Braun's death.