March 23, 1912 - Wernher von Braun

His trajectory cuts an unusually stark line through twentieth-century history: the same technical genius that produced a weapon of terror for the Nazi war machine was later absorbed into the American space program and credited with reaching the Moon. The V-2 rockets he helped develop at Peenemünde killed thousands — both in their use against civilian targets and through the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners who built them. His postwar reinvention under Operation Paperclip, and the institutional willingness to set aside that record in pursuit of Cold War advantage, made him one of the more consequential and contested figures of the era.

From Wikipedia

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun (US: VUR-nər von BROWN; German: [ˈvɛʁnheːɐ̯ fɔn ˈbʁaʊn]; 23 March 1912 – 16 June 1977) was a German American aerospace engineer and space architect. He led the development of German rocket technology in World War II, during which time he became a member of the Nazi Party and later the Allgemeine SS. Following the war, he relocated to the United States, developing missiles for the US Army and later designing rockets for NASA’s Apollo program.

As a young man, von Braun worked in Nazi Germany's rocket development program. He helped design and co-developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde Army Research Center during World War II. The V-2 became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line on 20 June 1944. Following the war, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip. He worked for the United States Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the United States' first space satellite Explorer 1 in 1958. He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in the US and beyond from 1955 to 1957.

⚠ Report a problem with this article