For most of the 1920s Robert Goddard had had the rocket-building field to himself. From the late 1920s rocket clubs began to appear across America and across the world – particularly in Russia and Germany. They were more than just places for swapping ideas; they were ambitious groups that attempted (and sometimes they succeeded) to build and launch their own rockets. The world’s first rocket club – the confidently named Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR; Society for Space Travel) – was formed in Germany in 1927 by Johann Winkler, Max Valier and Willy Ley. Almost from its inception it focused its attention on liquid-fuelled rockets. The three had worked together as consultants to Fritz Lang on his 1929 science fiction film Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon), based on a novel written by Lang’s then wife Thea von Harbou, which had in turn been inspired by a 92-page book titled Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (By Rocket into Interplanetary Space) written by Hermann Oberth, also a member of the VfR.
By Rocket into Interplanetary Space had started out as a doctoral thesis, but was rejected for being too ‘Utopian’. It was later published privately as a short book in 1923. It opens with the claim that it was already possible – by means of a multistage liquid-fuelled rocket – to take some kind of craft beyond the pull of the Earth’s gravitational field. Oberth speculated that within a few decades humans would travel into space, and that the construction of space rockets would by then be commercially profitable. The rest of the work is apparently unreadably dry, but Max Valier, one of the VfR’s founder members, wrote a popular version, Der Vorstoß in den Weltenraum (Advance into Space), which was an instant bestseller.
Oberth came across Goddard’s paper ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes’ as his own book was going to press. He wrote to Goddard and asked if he might discuss the paper in an appendix. Goddard wrote back warmly saying yes. When Goddard discovered what Oberth wrote he was appalled. It was clear to him that Oberth’s criticisms of his work were an attempt to claim precedence. Oberth wrote that Goddard didn’t have the vision to see beyond the exploration of the Earth’s atmosphere, to see the significance of rockets in the future exploration of outer space. Here he touched on the rawest of nerves. Goddard had begun to play up rockets as the means for exploring the atmosphere precisely because he had previously over-emphasized the rocket as the future means of exploring interplanetary space. When Nature gave Oberth’s book a favourable review, Goddard wrote to the journal claiming that Oberth had stolen his ideas. He also attempted to establish, ostensibly on behalf of his country, his own precedence: ‘I have read carefully the books that have been written in Germany recently on the application of the rocket method to the problem of interplanetary flight . . . and in every book disparagement is made of America’s contribution to the subject. I believe that, unless I can present the case in the proper way, when the time comes, my own . . . part in the problem will be put in an unfavorable light.’ When Oberth claimed that he had first considered hydrogen and oxygen as liquid fuel for rockets in 1912, Goddard countered that he had had the idea as early as 9 June 1909. Goddard dismissed Oberth, whose theoretical ideas were arguably ahead of his own, as a mere theorist. Oberth claimed, 30 years later, that he had never heard of Goddard and that his major influence had been Jules Verne, whom he held up as the true father of rocket science.
In Russia, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was at it too, invading Goddard’s territory. When Tsiolkovsky learned of the publication of Oberth’s The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, he rushed out a revised version of his 1903 paper as a book titled The Rocket into Cosmic Space. He sent copies to Goddard and Oberth. The paper had originally been ignored but now the book made a significant impact, at least in Russia.
Oberth and other members of the VfR had planned to launch a rocket to coincide with the release of Lang’s film in October 1929. The launch failed, but Oberth and his team built and fired their first liquid-fuelled rocket on 25 January 1930. The flight lasted five minutes. It was a significant achievement. They were not far behind Goddard.
In September 1930 the VfR was given permission by the military to use a larger launch site, Raketenflugplatz Berlin (Rocket Flight Field Berlin). They were joined that same month by a precocious 18-year-old student named Wernher von Braun.
Wernher Magnus Maximilian von Braun was born in 1912, with Junker ancestors on both sides. His father was Baron von Braun, his mother a von Quistorp. They knew who they were back to the thirteenth century: knights, generals, diplomats. His mother was a descendant of the Scottish king Robert III and the English king Edward III. More recent ancestors had numbered Immanuel Kant among their friends. As a child Wernher had piano lessons from Paul Hindemith, played piano duets with his mother, played the cello too, and composed. When he was ten, his mother asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said: ‘I want to work on the wheel of progress.’ She remembered because it had been such an odd thing to say. She said that he soaked up knowledge, that she never succeeded in being cross with him, that if he were ever badly behaved it was because of his ‘exuberant joy of life’. His father gave up trying to admonish him, it had no effect. His son matured so exorbitantly, he said, that he was glad he had taken this position. He said his son didn’t inherit his interest in science from him, that came from his mother. When he was 12, Wernher constructed a rocket-propelled wagon by attaching fireworks to it. His mother said that he certainly had a lot of fun as a child, going around junkyards with other boys, collecting bits of old cars to make new cars ‘with and without rocket propulsion’. He had his first plane ride when he was 13, in an open-cockpit Junker F13. From then on one of his ambitions was to become a pilot.
When he was 15, von Braun read and loved Kurd Lasswitz’s 1897 novel Auf zwei Planeten (On Two Planets). He was impressed by Lasswitz’s description of the precise trajectory the spacecraft – powered by anti-gravity – took between Earth and Mars. Wanting to know more, he sent off for a copy of Oberth’s The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. He was disappointed to find the book was densely written and full of mathematical equations. Mathematics and physics were two subjects that he had no interest in. It was at that moment that Wernher realized that his passion for rockets exceeded his loathing of maths and physics. As Lindbergh had done, he quickly turned himself from academic underachiever into prodigy. While he was still in his teens von Braun wrote a partial paper, ‘On the Theory of the Long-range Rocket’, trying to work out in mathematical terms the kind of orbital trajectories Lasswitz had described in his novel.
Von Braun was working in a Berlin machine factory when he decided to sign up to study with Hermann Oberth at the Technische Hochschule Berlin (Berlin Institute of Technology). It was an unusual choice for an aristocrat to have made. Invited to join the von Brauns at dinner, a student friend of Wernher’s was dismayed to discover ‘that every day the whole family spoke another language, French, Italian, English, Spanish, I think even Portuguese . . . I knew just a little French.’ After the ordeal at the dinner table, the friend described the relief of retiring to Wernher’s room to lie on the floor and talk about the thermodynamics of rocket propulsion.
At the Institute, and at the VfR, von Braun assisted Oberth in liquid-fuelled rocket motor tests. Oberth sent him out to raise funds for their research. Von Braun manned a display in a Berlin department store from where he delivered his pitch to passing Berlin housewives. He was Teutonic, tall, blonde, handsome (in a cartoonish sort of way – big-featured, square-jawed), and his charm was evident even then. Years later, he could still recall part of his patter: ‘I bet you,’ he told the bemused shoppers, ‘that the first man to walk on the moon is alive today somewhere on this Earth.’ And he was right. In 1930 moonwalkers had been born across America. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were both born that year. Alan Shepard, the fifth and oldest of the Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon, was seven years old. Soon after von Braun joined the VfR in 1930, Oberth left Germany to teach in Romania.
In 1931 von Braun travelled to Zurich to be at the celebrations following Auguste Picard’s record ascent. From the late eighteenth century, hot-air balloonists first saw the Earth from a vantage point that was not part of the Earth itself, not from the top of a mountain or a cathedral spire, but from the perspective of another medium. Over the next century, balloonists rose higher and higher above the Earth’s surface. ‘No man can have a just estimation of the insignificance of his species,’ wrote the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1828, ‘unless he has been in an air-balloon.’ On 10 June 1867 the French balloonist Camille Flammarion, brother to the famous publisher Ernest, took himself 10,827 feet above the River Loire, slightly higher, he noted, than Mount Olympus. He said the silence was so oppressive he could not help wondering if he were still alive. One early aeronaut used the word ‘hilarity’ to describe the sensation of being suspended, silently, in a gondola high above the ground. Another early balloonist described the Earth as looking like ‘a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding like a living creature’. In 1909 H. G. Wells wrote that ‘to be alone in a balloon at a height of fourteen or fifteen thousand feet is like nothing else in human experience. It is one of the supreme things possible to man.’ On 21 May 1931 Auguste Picard ascended to a record height of 51,775 feet, almost 10 miles. The Jenny, Lindbergh’s first plane, could reach a maximum altitude of around 21,000 feet. Even today most commercial planes are not permitted to fly higher than 45,000 feet. Von Braun introduced himself to Picard: ‘You know, I plan on travelling to the moon some time,’ he said. Picard was apparently encouraging.
Word of the VfR’s experiments with rockets made its way back to the army. The group had launched two types of liquid-fuelled rockets: the Mirak, which had not been a success, and the Repulsor, named after the spacecraft in Lasswitz’s novel. Several Repulsor rockets had reached 1,000 feet or more; one had crash-landed onto a local police barracks. The army sent along several observers who were mildly impressed by what they saw and gave the group a 1,000-Mark contract to make improvements. A junior officer, Captain Walter Dornberger, then aged 35, was sufficiently intrigued by von Braun that he offered to act as go-between. Dornberger had special responsibility for rocketry within Army Ordnance. He later wrote that he had been struck during his casual visits ‘by the energy and shrewdness with which this fair, tall, young student with the broad massive chin went to work, and by his astonishing theoretical knowledge’. It was the beginning of a long working relationship.
The modest contract brought up the question of whether or not the VfR should accept military funding, and led to the group breaking apart the following year. A new grouping emerged under the leadership of von Braun. Through Dornberger’s mediation, the group was offered the test-range site in Kummersdorf, 16 miles south of Berlin, as their new base. Von Braun was told to report to Dornberger and to keep the project secret. They began work on the first of a series of A rockets, A for Aggregat (the German word for aggregate) because of the number of parts that had to work together. The A-1 was designed by von Braun, stood 4 feet 7 inches tall, and was fuelled by a mixture of alcohol and liquid oxygen that provided a thrust of 660 lbs. It had a gyroscope in the nose meant to give it stability. The rocket, however, proved to be unstable and blew up on the launch pad.
Before he had reached the age of 22, von Braun was awarded a doctorate for his thesis ‘Design, Theoretical and Experimental Contributions to the Problem of the Liquid-Fuelled Rocket’. The manuscript was sent to the army for reasons of security. He had also taken up flying and was now a qualified pilot.
After 18 months’ work refining the A-1, von Braun was designing the A-2. The gyroscope was moved to the centre of the rocket in an attempt to solve the problem of instability. Two A-2 rockets were built, each 5 feet 3 inches tall, one nicknamed Max the other Moritz after famous cartoon characters. They were launched in December 1934 from Borkum (a German island in the North Sea), army dignitaries in attendance. One rocket reached an altitude of almost 1½ miles, the other over 2 miles – a new record if they had but known. This was better than anything Robert Goddard would ever achieve in America. One of the army officers in attendance asked von Braun if the rocket could be used as a military weapon and carry a warhead. ‘Probably,’ said von Braun, ‘but what would be the point?’ In August that year, immediately following the death of President Hindenburg, the Chancellor – Adolf Hitler – had styled himself Führer. News of the successful launch of the A-2s attracted the attention of the Luftwaffe. Von Braun was summoned to make a presentation. He had only got halfway through before he was cut off, to be told that they, too, wanted to fund von Braun’s group. They offered them a staggering 5 million Reichsmarks (then around $2 million in US dollars), ‘so that you can get the ball rolling’. Not to be outdone, and in order to maintain overall control of the project, Dornberger’s superior officer, Colonel Karl Becker, a scientist and army chief of ballistics and ammunition, increased the army’s funding to 6 million Reichsmarks (they had recently offered half a million after witnessing a static firing test of an A-3 engine). Before he had turned 24 years old, von Braun was in charge of a budget of 11 million Reichsmarks. It was funding beyond all Goddard’s dreams.
Von Braun’s sole ambition was to build a space rocket. As a young man he once turned up at a fancy dress party dressed as himself in his seventies: he said he was the famous von Braun who had been to Mars and back. ‘We always considered the development of rockets for military purposes as a roundabout way to get into space,’ von Braun wrote. He felt, naively or not, that in the mid-1930s he and his group still retained the power balance. They were exploiting the army and air force to their own ends as the pioneers of aviation had done, or so he believed. All I ever wanted, he once said, was a rich uncle. And now he had two rich uncles, the army and the Luftwaffe.
Part of his 11 million Reichsmarks was earmarked to build a new launch pad. When von Braun told his mother that they were looking for a suitable location for a new launch site, she suggested Peenemünde at the northern tip of the island of Usedom, a beautiful area of dense forests, marshes, and sandy beaches, where her ancestors had had estates. ‘Your grandfather used to go duck-hunting up there,’ she said.
Two large operations were constructed on the site: Peenemünde East, Werk Ost, under the control of the army, and Peenemünde West, Werk West, under the control of the Luftwaffe. There would be great rivalry between the two divisions. Von Braun’s group moved to Werk Ost during April and May 1937.
At the age of 25, looking 18 – he had trouble getting served in bars – von Braun was now technical director of the operations at Werk Ost in charge of a team of 350. He was ‘the heart and soul of the place’, wrote his biographer Michael Neufeld. It was here that von Braun’s real genius for management and engineering flourished. Despite his patrician Prussian bearing he was never aloof. He was witty, diplomatic, always polite and enthusiastic. He was both a good listener and a good talker, and, famously, he had charm. For a bet von Braun once drove three times around a Berlin church in the wrong direction. The police officers were so disarmed by him that not only did they not press charges, but accepted his invitation to go for a drink. A colleague who had been there at the time wrote later that it was that experience that made him realize that he would go through fire for such a man.
The army, von Braun claimed, took great care to keep the Nazi Party at bay, at least at first. He said that in those first years he had worked ‘in an environment that was rather hermetically sealed against any Nazi party infiltration . . .’ But in late 1937 when membership reopened, von Braun did join the National Socialist Party. He said he had been commanded to. Both his father Magnus and older brother Sigismund had warned him against joining the party. When Hitler had declared himself Chancellor in 1933, the Baron had resigned his public office and retired to a small estate in Silesia. He never joined the party. As a young diplomat at the German Embassy, Sigismund had had to swear allegiance to Hitler. He wrote in his diary that afterwards he felt anxious for his humanity. He spoke out against Hitler and the future world conflagration he said Hitler risked. Both Wernher von Braun and Dornberger were horrified by his recklessness. Sigismund would be sent to a backwater posting in Addis Ababa, then the capital of Italian-occupied Ethiopia. Wernher von Braun said that he only wore his uniform and swastika pin when there were visiting dignitaries. He was never openly critical of Nazism but he was careless sometimes, or casual in what he said. He had a habit of getting carried away and talking about his dreams of manned space flight. His exuberance would get him into trouble, but that was later.
The first rockets to be fired at Peenemünde were von Braun’s A-3 missiles. They advanced the A-2 by adding an inertial guidance system, basically a way of making the missile self-steering. It was effectively a simple analogue computer, a step on the road that would lead to IBM’s Apollo Guidance Computer.
Standing 22 feet 1 inch tall, the A-3 was designed to fly to an altitude of 15 miles carrying a payload of 100 lbs. The engine produced a thrust of 3,300 lbs. Four A-3s were built. One reached an altitude of 11 miles but all of them developed problems of one kind or another after launch. And yet despite the problems, von Braun and his team were by now far ahead of the rest of the world. An altitude of 11 miles was also 1 mile higher than Picard’s record ascent of 1931, though Picard’s record had been broken several times, most recently on 11 November 1935. As part of an expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society, Captain A. W. Stephens and Captain O. A. Andrews from the US Army Air Corps ascended to an altitude of 13.7 miles in a gondola attached to a helium-filled balloon. It was one of the first attempts to explore the stratosphere scientifically. A photograph taken from the balloon as it sailed high above the Black Hills of South Dakota captured the curvature of the Earth for the first time: visual – rather than merely intellectual – proof that we live on a sphere. The photographs showed a panorama stretching 330 miles. There had been earlier photographs from lower altitudes that purported to show the Earth’s curvature, but in those cases the curvature was only apparent, an artificial consequence of the use of wideangled lenses.
Von Braun’s team soon abandoned the A-3 in favour of the next iteration. The A-4 was to be a huge leap forward from the A-3. Years of testing lay ahead before one of the most famous rockets ever built became flightworthy. Late in the coming war the A-4 would be renamed Vergeltungswaffe 2, Vengeance Weapon 2, or more familiarly, the V-2.
On a cold, rainy day in the spring of 1939, Hitler made his first visit to Peenemünde, along with Field Marshal von Brauchitsch and General Karl Becker from Army Ordnance, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, and several others. They witnessed the firing of two types of rocket engine – not an actual launch. Hitler was not impressed. Dornberger had had to warn von Braun not to talk about space. Their job was to build weapons. Von Braun admitted later that he had been so keen to talk to the Führer about space exploration that he had had to bite his tongue. Instead, von Braun tried to describe to Hitler the technical problems the engines presented. Hitler walked away shaking his head, saying nothing. Later, Hitler became more animated and said: ‘Even now I still don’t know how a liquid-propellant rocket can fly. Why do you need two tanks and two different engines?’ Von Braun was in despair. He had just explained why. Hitler had clearly been paying no attention at all. He explained it all over again, and this time, since Hitler still did not seem to have got the point, he emphasized the potential the rockets offered as carriers of weapons. Hitler seemed bored and fell silent. The party left. No further funding was offered but neither was their budget cut.
Later that year Britain and France declared war on Germany. With steel quotas cut and redirected to the manufacture of munitions, something drastic had to be done to protect the work at Peenemünde. The workforce at Werk Ost alone now numbered 1,200. It was clear that the operation would have to maximize its contribution to the war effort if it was to continue to justify its level of funding. Dornberger wrote a memo to his superiors declaring that Germany was in a rocket arms race with other nations. Dornberger may have been encouraged to pursue the deception because of the work of an inept intelligence operative working in America named Gustav Guellich. For years Guellich sent reports on Robert Goddard to a German military attaché in the US named General Friedrich von Boetticher. It had started early in 1936, when Boetticher sent a copy of the 4 January issue of Science News Letter to the army’s General Staff in Berlin. The front cover of the journal was a photograph of a Goddard rocket. Inside was the transcript of a presentation Goddard had made at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) the week before. The attaché noted that Goddard had the support of both the Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Institute. General Staff forwarded the communiqué to Guellich, and told him to investigate further. Over the next years Guellich submitted regular reports, mostly fabricated.
On the last day of October 1939 an A-5 rocket (somewhat confusingly, a small version of the future A-4) was successfully launched. ‘It was an unforgettable sight,’ von Braun said. ‘The slim missile rose slowly from its platform, climbing vertically with ever-increasing speed and without the slightest oscillation, until it vanished in the overcast.’ He could hear the rocket thunder away into the distance. At 22 seconds after launch, he sent a radio signal to the rocket to cut the engine and deploy the parachutes. Then, five minutes later, the rocket came back into view as it landed, perfectly, 200 feet offshore. It was the first successful controlled flight of one of the army’s larger missiles. Werk Ost was set a target: to make the A-4 operational within two years.