Wernher von Braun

Wernher von Braun was born on March 23, 1912 in Wirsitz, West Prussia, Germany.

In 1929, he joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR), the German Rocket Society which had been founded on July 5, 1927. Von Braun became director of Germany's military rocket development program in 1936. As Adolf Hitler's German War Machine collapsed, Berlin authorities ordered the VfR to destroy all classified documents. Von Braun disobeyed, hiding them in an abandoned mine. On May 2, 1945, the rocket team surrendered to invading American forces. Von Braun and his team were transferred to the US with about 150 captured V-2 rockets.

Received his bachelor's degree from the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1932 and two years later he earned a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Berlin.

He is known for his work on The Magical World of Disney (1954), Footprints on the Moon: Apollo 11 (1969) and Horizon (1964). He was married to Maria Luise von Quistorp.

Von Braun's rocket team at Huntsville, Alabama, built the first American ballistic missile, named the Redstone. In August 1953, the first Redstone rocket was tested at Cape Canaveral, Florida. On January 31, 1958, a modified Redstone (the Jupiter C) put the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit.

In 1960, his team was transferred to NASA to form the nucleus of the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville. Here he continued the development of larger rockets: the Saturn I, the Saturn IB (the rocket that launched the Apollo spacecraft in Earth orbit) and the Saturn V, the rocket that put man on the Moon.

Von Braun retired from NASA on June 10, 1972. He became involved in the private industrial sector and was active in establishing and promoting the National Space Institute. At the peak of his activities, von Braun learned he had cancer, which forced him to retire on December 31, 1976.