“We knew if von Braun was leading it, things were going to get bigger and better.” That summarized the upbeat attitude of many within the expanded von Braun rocket team facing transfer from the U.S. Army to NASA, according to engineer-manager Robert “Bob” Schwinghamer.1 The mass reassignment of more than forty-five hundred personnel from the newly organized Army Ordnance Missile Command, successor to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, at Redstone Arsenal to MSFC (the Marshall Space Flight Center) took place July 1, 1960. MSFC was given an eighteen-hundred-acre enclave on the sprawling military post and became NASA’s largest center in staff and budget. This was von Braun’s first time as chief executive of his team. What did the future hold for his group in civilian space work? Would there even be a long-term future for them in Huntsville?
Those familiar with von Braun’s record, like the American-born Bob Schwinghamer, shrugged off any doubts. Bigger came right away, with advances in the preliminary work on what became the Saturn family of super-boosters. The first was the C-1 launch vehicle—originally designated Juno V. It was soon renamed Saturn I, because, von Braun explained, in the order of planets in the solar system, Saturn came after Jupiter, the name of his team’s last big rocket.
President Eisenhower formally dedicated the Marshall Center on September 8 in Huntsville, a few months before he was to leave office. During a tour of the center’s facilities, he stopped at a test stand and beheld the large eight-engine cluster of a Saturn I first stage. The president turned to von Braun and confessed: “They come into my office and say it has eight engines. I didn’t know if they put one on top of the other or what!”2
Clearly, the earlier presidential briefer had not been von Braun. Dwight Eisenhower, the career army man, had scarcely acknowledged the string of successes by the army missile and space team during his eight years in the White House. His army comrades and the news media were struck by the persistent slight, as former army and NASA public relations official Gordon Harris noted in his memoirs.3 Was it because the army group was led on the technical side by von Braun and all those other former German enemies of Ike in World War II?
Whatever the problem, the popular president—who had German ancestry on both parents’ sides—relented in dedicating the Marshall Center.
Here under army guidance the Redstone, Jupiter, and a whole family of missiles have taken form. I share with the army its gratification in these trailblazing achievements. They have thrilled the people and won plaudits throughout the world. I freely admit sentimentally that my contemplation of these advances is stirred because so much of this dramatic achievement was pioneered by the army, which until recently was my life and my home.4
As head of NASA’s main new center for launch vehicle development, von Braun knew that future projects would require major advances in large booster rockets. One day he was discussing the relative importance of factors such as aerodynamic design with Schwinghamer. To von Braun, nothing was so important in big rockets as raw lifting power, as sheer thrust. “I can fly a beer can,” quipped the scientist, “if you give me enough propulsion.”5
Things got busier fast at the new space center in northern Alabama. In preparation for the Mercury-Redstone flights of an American one-man spaceship, the Marshall Center readied the first suborbital test of an unmanned capsule. It scored a success on December 19, 1960. After two more successful test flights—on January 31, 1961, with the chimpanzee “Ham,” and then with chimp “Enos” on March 24—the von Braun team stood ready to boost Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard as the first human in space.
The Russians, though, had their own plans. On April 12 Moscow announced that Soviet Air Force Maj. Yuri Gagarin had safely orbited Earth one full revolution in a five-ton spacecraft. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev told the orbiting Gagarin, “Let the capitalist countries catch up with our country!”
Von Braun, after offering his congratulations to the Soviet space agency, called the feat “the shot heard around the world.” He added to reporters, knowing the White House and Congress were listening, “We are going to have to run like hell to catch up!”
President John F. Kennedy, newly in office and already battered by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, wearily shared his candid reaction to cosmonaut Gagarin’s coup. “No one is more tired than I am” of America’s second-place standing in the new space age. But there was no escaping the truth, JFK admitted to reporters: “It is going to take some time. We are behind.”
Von Braun, his Marshall Center team, and their partners scrambled to regain some of the lost ground. On May 5, just three weeks after Gagarin’s orbital flight, navy Commander Shepard climbed atop a Redstone rocket at Cape Canaveral. His single-seat capsule, nicknamed “Freedom 7” for the original seven Mercury spacemen, was provided by NASA’s MSC (Manned Spacecraft Center) near Houston. The mini-spaceship was boosted on a curving, fifteen-minute ride 116 miles up and back to a splashdown in the Atlantic and recovery by the aircraft carrier USS Lake Champlain. It was no orbital mission, but America had put a man in space, however briefly.
On Huntsville’s Courthouse Square, the site of public celebrations of U.S. space feats ever since the first Explorer satellite launching, von Braun told the joyous crowd: “Our opponents across the ocean, behind the Iron Curtain, thought about a month ago they had slammed the door to the universe in our face, but Shepard has let us out of our dilemma and embarrassment. . . . We will go farther and farther, eventually landing on the Moon.”6
Even before former navy test pilot Shepard’s baby step into space, President Kennedy had seized the initiative. On April 20, 1961, after Gagarin’s stunning flight, he had asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to recommend a specific national space project that could produce “dramatic results” in the competition with the Soviets, one that the United States “could win.”7
Johnson—like JFK, a navy veteran of World War II—immediately wrote to von Braun, MSC Director Bob Gilruth, Gen. Bennie Schriever, U.S. Air Force, and several others asking for their counsel on the question. Von Braun responded on April 29 with a ten-page letter to “My dear Mr. Vice President.” After noting that there was a “sporting chance” of achieving several specific American “firsts” in space in the coming years, he wrote that the nation had “an excellent chance” of scoring a manned lunar landing before 1970—and ahead of the Russians. He spelled out the reasons and emphasized the abundance of benefits that would accrue from such an enterprise.8
The same day he received von Braun’s response, LBJ wrote Kennedy that the clear choice was a manned landing on the Moon. The new NASA Administrator, James E. “Jim” Webb, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara also signed the formal report to the president. Although several others had made the same recommendation as von Braun, Johnson’s letter to Kennedy closely followed the points made by the Marshall Center director.
Indications were that von Braun’s argument had been the most persuasive, but he always downplayed his singular influence on the recommendation given to JFK, saying the Moon was a consensus choice. He told one interviewer: “I would not like to take credit for this myself. I participated in discussions with Vice President Johnson concerning what this country could do to assume leadership in space. The consensus was that we needed a clear, highly ambitious goal—one that was hard-hitting and long-range enough so the Russians could not do it first.”9
The next month, on May 10, Kennedy made his decision. On May 25 he spoke to a joint session of Congress on the subject of space. America had fifteen minutes of manned spaceflight experience and zero time in orbit. Despite that, President Kennedy challenged the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”
At NASA centers and aerospace plants around the country, jubilation reigned. Von Braun and his board of directors at Marshall—the laboratory chiefs and other key players from Peenemünde10—had gathered in their main conference room to hear Kennedy’s speech. Shouts of “Ja!” and “Let’s go!” sounded when the specific goal and deadline were announced—even if almost one and a half years of the decade were already gone. “For the first time, it felt like fun to be working for NASA,” recalled one lab director, Walter Haeussermann.11
Von Braun publicly lauded Kennedy’s challenge of Project Apollo as one that “puts the program into focus,” clearly and concisely, for the nation. “Everyone knows what the Moon is, what this decade is, what it means to get some people there—and everyone knows a live astronaut from one who isn’t.”
Of the dramatic Apollo call to action, television personality Hugh Downs recalled: “When President Kennedy said, ‘We choose to go to the Moon!’ and set a timetable of ten years, many of the scientists I knew were horrified. They said they were sure we’d get there, but that it would take thirty years.”12
Former President Eisenhower was among the vocal doubters and critics. “Why the great hurry to get to the Moon and the planets?” Ike asked news reporters, calling Project Apollo “a mad effort to win a stunt race. To spend $40 billion to be the first to reach the Moon is just nuts!”
Von Braun pointed out that some had called Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic to Paris a “stunt” too, but look what it did for aviation. He insisted that Apollo would be “the wisest investment America has ever made,” stimulating advances in science, technology, and the economy—and at a cost well under $40 billion. “Even should we find out that the Moon is made of green cheese,” Apollo would be worth every penny spent, von Braun later argued.
He had been thinking about voyages to the Moon—and beyond—decades before Kennedy issued his challenge. A magazine writer had asked von Braun in 1951 how a trip to the Moon rated with him versus a journey to Mars.
Mars is more of a challenge. It would take 260 days to get there. To the Moon it’s only 100 hours. Personally, though, I’d rather go to the Moon than to Mars, even if the trip is shorter. After all, a journey to the Moon is unquestionably a possibility. The Moon’s face, thanks to telescopes, is more familiar to us than even some parts of the Earth—the mountain ranges in Tibet, for example. All that’s needed is adequate funds and continuity of effort.13
With Project Apollo, he would get plenty of money and a high priority. Longtime close associates insisted—and he made no secret of it—that Mars was his ultimate objective, however, and would remain so throughout his life. The Moon would be just a stepping-stone.
America’s second manned space flight came on July 21, 1961, with Maj. Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, U.S. Air Force, duplicating Shepard’s brief suborbital excursion. The carrier USS Randolph recovered the astronaut—but not his Liberty Bell 7 Mercury capsule, which sank in the Atlantic from a prematurely blown escape hatch cover after splashdown.
October 1961 saw the maiden test flight of a Saturn I. It was the first in the series of three versions of heavy-duty space launch vehicles to be developed by von Braun’s Marshall Center team for Apollo, Skylab, and the joint Apollo-Soyuz manned orbital mission with the Soviets. The big rocket, with the clustered eight engines of its first stage generating an unprecedented 1.3 million pounds of thrust (later uprated to 1.5 million), performed successfully.
Things might not have gone so smoothly if what was termed the “Ostrander Affair” had ended differently, according to Walter Haeussermann, a veteran member of the von Braun team. The steering sensors that Haeussermann’s Guidance and Control Laboratory planned to use for the first Saturn-class vehicle had been refined through years of development for the army’s Redstone, Jupiter, and Pershing missiles. But when the team transferred to NASA, the new agency’s director of Launch Vehicle Programs in Washington, Maj. Gen. Donald Ostrander, U.S. Air Force, told Haeussermann’s lab at Huntsville to replace its proven sensors and associated computers with those intended for the air force-developed Centaur missile.
Full testing—by the manufacturer as well as Haeussermann’s crew—found extensive problems with the unproven Centaur instruments, Haeussermann recalled. With von Braun’s approval and a negative report in hand, the lab chief met with Ostrander in Washington. “This is completely uncalled for!” the air force general exploded, summarily dismissing Haeussermann from his office.14
Back in Huntsville, the lab chief told von Braun what had happened and said he would have to resign. “Walter,” von Braun replied, “you react as you would have to in the Old Country. Here you fight for your convictions!”
“I went along,” recalled Haeussermann, “knowing that we would fight together.” Soon Ostrander wrote to von Braun pressing for conversion to the Centaur sensors. Von Braun scheduled a meeting the next day with the general and took Haeussermann with him. The latter waited outside Ostrander’s office while von Braun went in. After fifteen minutes von Braun came out, smiling and happy—the general had backed off.
“How did you accomplish this?” an astonished Haeussermann asked.
“I told him he will have my resignation” over the issue, a still-smiling von Braun answered. The two rocket veterans enjoyed a good laugh. Von Braun’s team used its own sensors.15 The general later left NASA.
As was apparent from the Ostrander Affair, the otherwise halcyon Saturn-Apollo era had its share of conflicts. Friction arose among the competitive, ambitious field centers, between the centers and NASA headquarters, and at times between the centers and their contractors in industry. Usually, the struggles revolved around substantive issues or differences in management approaches. But personalities clashed too, especially before time had allowed respectful, if not friendly, relationships to grow.
Von Braun sometimes aroused resentment within the space agency because of his aggressive efforts to gain added programs, facilities, and budget dollars for the Marshall Center. Jealousies also arose over his celebrity status as the spokesman for the space age, at news conferences, on Capitol Hill, and on the speaking circuit.
And a few officials within the NASA hierarchy found it hard, if not impossible, to get beyond his wartime service to the Third Reich. Houston’s Gilruth and NASA’s first flight director, Chris Kraft, for instance, had both worked on warplane design in World War II and had developed an acknowledged distaste then for the people behind the V-2. Early in NASA’s life, an “antipathy” between Gilruth and von Braun “was simmering just beneath the surface,” Kraft wrote in his autobiography. He recalled that Gilruth had once said, “Von Braun doesn’t care what flag he fights for.”16 Kraft did not disagree. It was the old concern about von Braun’s having transferred his allegiance so readily from Germany to the United States. In the end, however, the harsh feelings gave way to a warmer relationship between von Braun and Gilruth, if not between the former and Kraft.
Perhaps one of the most unlikely personal relationships formed during Apollo was that between von Braun and Major Gen. Samuel Phillips, U.S. Air Force, who was brought into NASA as the Apollo program director. As a World War II fighter pilot based in England, Phillips was not only on the wrong end of V-2 attacks but he had also escorted bombers on raids against von Braun’s Peenemünde center. In postwar years the two men became, and remained during the push to the Moon, true friends, as Phillips made clear in Ernst Stuhlinger and Fred Ordway’s biographical memoir of von Braun.17
From the start, von Braun had a lively rapport with America’s astronauts. As a mechanical-aeronautical engineer, a natural risk-taker, and an avid pilot, the physicist identified closely with them. For many years he had imagined himself alongside them, traveling aboard a rocket ship through the heavens. He often expressed the hope—the expectation—of someday doing so. “Dr. von Braun always got over to see the astronauts whenever they visited,” Schwinghamer recalled. “He liked those guys, and they knew it.”18
The U.S. manned space program at last went orbital on February 20, 1962. An air force Atlas ICBM boosted Lt. Col. John H. Glenn Jr., U.S. Marine Corps, into three swings around Earth—and a dicey reentry with his braking rockets’ “retropack”—in the first of four successful Mercury orbital missions. The destroyer USS Noa effected a smooth recovery, lowering Glenn’s Friendship 7 spacecraft onto its deck with the astronaut still inside. President Kennedy, honoring Glenn later in the Rose Garden, took the opportunity to tell the nation: “We have a long way to go in this space race. We started late. But this is a new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it and be in a position second to none.”
Von Braun praised Glenn’s unflappable performance and called his flight “a Bunyan step” for America and the rest of the non-Communist world. “It puts us,” he stated at a press conference, “right where we belong—in space.” Von Braun’s friendly personal relationship with Glenn, an alumnus of the Naval Aviation Cadet Program and combat pilot in both World War II and the Korean conflict, persisted over time. Four years after the 1962 orbital flight, the rocket scientist received a postcard from the then-retired spaceman. Glenn’s card had been sent from Switzerland with a message handwritten in German, the English translation of which is:
Dear Wernher—
Here I am in Lucerne and you are in Huntsville.
What a switch! It is 26 years ago that I studied German and I cannot remember many words.
Cordially,
J. H. Glenn, Jr.19
In 1962 President Kennedy made the first of two visits to the Marshall Center to check on Project Apollo. Hosting the president’s September 11 tour of the center’s R & D, assembly, and test facilities, von Braun showed JFK a model of the forthcoming Saturn V rocket. “This is the vehicle,” he dramatically assured the president, “which is designed to fulfill your promise to put a man on the Moon by the end of this decade.” He paused, glanced at the rocket model, then at Kennedy, and exclaimed, “By God, we’ll do it!”
The president impulsively asked von Braun to accompany him to his next stop, Cape Canaveral. Perhaps buoyed by von Braun’s confidence, Kennedy declared in a speech there that despite the nation’s late start in the space race, “We shall be first!”
Eight months later, in May 1963, Kennedy returned to look in on progress at MSFC. The president was treated to a raucous, window-rattling static firing of a Saturn booster stage strapped down in a test stand. After experiencing the fiery demonstration from an outdoor observation bunker, Kennedy grabbed von Braun’s hand, congratulated him, and enthused within earshot of reporters: “That’s just wonderful! . . . If I could only show all this to the people in Congress!”
Within six months Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Von Braun heard the terrible news over the radio while returning home aboard a NASA plane after testifying before Congress. The death hit von Braun hard. A bond of “mutual admiration” had developed between Kennedy and von Braun, according to Bonnie Holmes.20
On that November 22 Wernher and Maria von Braun had had an invitation in hand from the Kennedys to attend a White House reception on November 25, which proved to be the day the president was buried, the secretary remembered. While the rest of the nation marked a day of mourning for the president’s funeral, a distressed von Braun sought refuge in his work. He had asked his secretary/confidante if she would come in that day so they could attack the backlog. Only the two were in his office suite that sad day.21 He lamented to her: “What a waste. What a tragic loss of a friend and a great leader.”
“There was a large-screen TV in his office,” Holmes recalled. “He would dictate a little and then we would watch the funeral on TV. I guess that was the only time I ever saw him actually cry. He was very moved.”22
Von Braun waited about two months—for a significant rocket launch success in the Saturn-Apollo program John Kennedy had initiated—before sitting down to compose a handwritten, two-page letter of condolence on personal stationery to the fallen president’s wife.
February 1, 1964
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
In our elation over the successful launch of SA-5 last Wednesday—the fifth in a successful string of launchings of Saturn I rockets, but the first capable of going into orbit—I must tell you how happy and grateful we are that this test came off so well. All of us connected with this undertaking knew only too well how eagerly the late President had been looking forward to this launching, which would at last establish the long-awaited American lead in the capability of orbiting heavy payloads.
The trust he had placed in us, and his confidence that we would succeed, offered great encouragement but placed on us an even greater sense of obligation. I am enclosing a picture taken in front of the towering SA-5 rocket at Cape Kennedy on November 16th. The model at the left depicts the upper part of the rocket which is now orbiting the earth once every 94 minutes. The unit in orbit has a length of 83 feet and a weight of 37,800 lbs.
You have been overwhelmed with condolences from all over the world at the tragic death of your beloved husband. Like for so many, the sad news from Dallas was a terrible personal blow to me. We do not know a better way of honoring the late President than to do our very best to make his dream and determination come true that “America must learn to sail on the new ocean of space, and be in a position second to none.”
With deepest sympathy—Wernher von Braun
Within a few days he received a handwritten, two-page response from the president’s widow, composed on her personal stationery. It read:
February 11, 1964
Dear Dr. von Braun
I so thank you for your letter—about the Saturn—and about my husband.
What a wonderful world it was for a few years—with men like you to help realize his dreams for this country—And you with a President who admired and understood you—so that together you changed the way the world looked at America—and made us proud again.
Please do me one favor—sometimes when you are making an announcement about some spectacular new success—say something about President Kennedy and how he helped to turn the tide—so people won’t forget.
I hope I am not the only one to feel this way—It is my only consolation—that at least he was given time to do some great work on this earth, which now seems such a miserable and lonely place without him.
How much more he could have done—but I must not think about that.
I do thank you for your letter.
Sincerely,
Jacqueline Kennedy23
Kennedy’s death brought into the White House the tall, raw-boned Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was an earlier and stronger space supporter than President Kennedy. When tragedy struck in Dallas, “von Braun was working at the highest levels of the government . . . especially with LBJ as vice president,” recalled close NASA associate Jay Foster. “Von Braun had been at the LBJ ranch a couple of times working that interface, and he was scheduled to go to the ranch for dinner during what turned out to be the week after the assassination. Of course, that was canceled.”24
But life—and Project Apollo—moved on. The next year, President Johnson presented von Braun with a five-gallon cowboy hat during his visit to the LBJ ranch sometime before the fifth unmanned test flight of a Saturn I rocket. The morning the rocket flew flawlessly, on January 29, 1964, Johnson telephoned his congratulations to NASA officials gathered in the launch control center at Cape Canaveral. Then the president asked whether the hat he’d given von Braun still fit. The space agency official on the line replied he wasn’t sure, but glancing at the happy von Braun, added, “I believe his head is beginning to swell.”25
Managing von Braun’s part of the Apollo enterprise meant, among other things, presiding over countless meetings at Marshall. The center director “was superb at running a meeting,” recalled Schwinghamer. “Sometimes there would be fierce arguments—I mean, cuss fights. Von Braun would say, ‘Now, gentlemen, gentlemen! Let’s reason this out.’ He had this fantastic ability to get people to stop fighting and work it out. He could be subtle, too, not heavy-handed.” He also “had this knack: You always wanted to help him when you left” the meeting.26
At one special meeting von Braun sprang an unwelcome surprise on his Marshall Center hierarchy of German-born technical leaders, all of whom had cherished direct access to him, remembered Lee B. James, von Braun’s first non-German manager of a major technical program at Marshall. “He was going to have all these lab chiefs report to one person, who then would report to him,” recalled James. “All of a sudden, all the lab chiefs started saying, ‘Wernher, this will never work because of so forth and so on!’ That conversation went on for over two hours.” Finally, when the chiefs had exhausted the subject, von Braun looked around the table and asked, “Does anybody else have any comments? No? Well, I think I’ll go ahead and do what I said.” The lab chiefs, James said, “didn’t make a peep. He had let them talk themselves out. . . . That was the way he managed.”27
For a bold space thinker, von Braun had a reputation as an ultraconservative rocket engineer. He was inclined to rely on the safe and proven, to move ahead only in measured steps, with great caution, and to test, test, and test again—down to the last component of the last subsystem. With new rockets, he strongly favored a deliberate, step-by-step approach from development to operation. With a new two-stage rocket such as the Saturn I, for instance, his team first flew it with only a live first stage, topped by a dummy second stage. That was done repeatedly before the live second stage was added for more test flights.
As those tests proceeded, and with the Saturn IB not far behind, von Braun and his crew were counting on employing the same incremental test-flight plan with the huge, three-stage Saturn V Moon rocket. Until, that is, George E. Mueller (pronounced “Miller”) became head of the NASA Office of Manned Space Flight. He soon decreed that all Saturn Vs would be launched “all up.” That meant all three stages went live, starting with the first flight test, because of Project Apollo schedule dictates. Von Braun and his team strenuously objected to the edict—until convinced it was indeed necessary if they were going to make it to the Moon, as promised, before 1970.
Meanwhile, after the remaining Mercury orbital flights by Lt. Cdr. M. Scott Carpenter and Cdr. Walter M. “Wally” Schirra Jr., U.S. Navy, and Maj. L. Gordon Cooper Jr., U.S. Air Force, were safely logged, the successful two-man Gemini flight program in 1965–66 ran concurrent with the Project Apollo buildup. The honor and challenge of crewing the first Gemini mission, on March 23, 1965, went to Grissom and Lt. Cdr. John W. Young, U.S. Navy. With Gilruth’s Houston center in the lead role, Gemini increased the nation’s man-hours in orbit, provided vital spacecraft rendezvous and docking experience, and developed spacewalking skills. Cape Canaveral became a busy place.
At the Florida spaceport, U.S. rocketry’s only recorded “de-scrubbing” of a canceled launch attempt involved the scheduled first flight test of the Saturn IB, the mid-size Saturn. On a February morning in 1966, the crucial countdown was halted because of a problem with propulsion systems. Launch Control soon announced the mission was scrubbed for the day. CBS Newscaster Walter Cronkite reported that it would be several days before NASA could reschedule. Busloads of VIP guests and reporters left the site.
Meanwhile, Lee James and his Marshall propulsion crew continued to “work the problem,” aided by a team of experts on standby back in Huntsville. Within minutes they had a solution, and the fix was made. James quickly polled his propulsion team and got unanimity to proceed. The former army colonel made the decision on the spot to de-scrub, and the launch countdown resumed—to the amazement of everyone still around.28
A perplexed George Mueller came bounding down from his seat in Launch Control, followed by von Braun, who was James’s boss. Mueller asked James what was going on. James explained it all, point by point, emphasizing he had full agreement from his propulsion people that all was “go.”
“George thought about it,” James recalled, “and he said, ‘Tell me again what you did.’ And I said, ‘I did this, this, and this, and then I restarted the count.’ He looked up and said, ‘I wouldn’t have done that, Lee, if I had been you.’ And then he turned and walked out of the room. I thought that was rather odd of George: He didn’t say ‘Stop the count,’ he just tells me he’s not happy with my decision.” James glanced at von Braun, “and he winked at me—winked real big—and I let the count go. I doubt that I would have kept that decision if I hadn’t gotten that wink. But I didn’t need anybody else on my side at that point.”29
The first Saturn IB flight came off perfectly that day. James not only kept his job but was later promoted to director of the Saturn V rocket program.
Originally designated C-5, Saturn V was conceived by the von Braun team as having a first stage of four enormous F-1 engines generating 1.5 million pounds of thrust each. As the payload weight requirements for an anticipated manned lunar-landing project kept growing, even before Kennedy’s Apollo announcement, the need for a fifth engine became clear.
Just who first cited that need became the subject of a small debate. Milton Rosen, the early NASA chief of Rocket Vehicle Development Programs, came out for the fifth engine in March 1961. Von Braun likewise saw the need early on. “I have always pleaded for it,” he recalled. “I said relatively early ‘to build the thing with four engines doesn’t make sense. This great big hole in the center is crying for a fifth engine.’”30
The addition of the fifth engine also spawned an enduring piece of rocketry folklore. Hugh Downs recalled:
In those simpler, glorious days when the Saturn V was being developed, von Braun asked in a NASA meeting of design engineers how much safer it would be for the first stage to have five engines instead of the four . . . in the original design. When the engineers studied this and reported a much greater safety margin, Wernher said, “Make it five.” And they did. There is no way that could be done, by anybody, now [in a modern bureaucracy].”31
NASA gave its blessing to the fifth engine in December 1961, upping the power of the S-1C booster stage from 6 million to 7.5 million pounds of thrust. It proved to be a good move.
At the start of Saturn V’s development, even the more experienced, German-born members of the von Braun team found “the tremendous size of the beast” daunting. “We looked at drawings of the Saturn V and could not believe it would fly,” Willy Mrazek, an expert in rocket engineering and manufacturing, confessed.32
Standing almost 365 feet tall including the Apollo spacecraft, it towered six stories taller than the Statue of Liberty, including pedestal. The rocket would weigh nearly 6.5 million pounds at liftoff—and more than 6 million of that would be propellants. The vehicle would have more than three million parts, with each stage containing in excess of seventy miles of electrical wiring and enough piping, tubing, valves, and pumps to be called “a plumber’s nightmare.” NASA Administrator Glennan described the planned super-rocket as “one of the most amazing combinations of engineering, plumbing, and plain hope anyone could imagine.”33 Others would see it as a machine the size of a cathedral built to the tolerances of a microscope.
As Saturn V moved ahead, von Braun and his engineers could not resist coming up with comparisons to put into perspective the size and brutish power of what was to be the Mother of All Rockets. For starters, just one fuel pump for one of the five F-1 engines in the first stage—by far the biggest power plant ever built—would exert the force of thirty locomotives. As designed, the five-engine cluster would generate the equivalent hydroelectric power of eighty-five Hoover Dams—or twice the power that would be created if all the rivers of North America were harnessed at once and channeled through turbines.
Von Braun had a strong dislike for “Moon rocket” as a description of the leviathan. He found the term much too restrictive. “We have built Saturn V not just to go to the Moon and pick up a handful of dirt. We built it to explore all of space—to reach for the stars,” he stressed.34 The colossus of combustion was “the most powerful rocket in the world—at least for the time being,” von Braun noted. “It is by no means the limit to which we can go, but it gives us the capability to do many things in space just by pushing a button.”35 Magazine writer Gene Bylinski dubbed Saturn V “Dr. von Braun’s All-Purpose Space-Machine.”36
Behind it all was “the team” that von Braun continued to lead. Just how extraordinary was this group? It retained the same cohesiveness and devotion to its leader no matter how large it grew during Apollo, observers noted. Peenemünde veteran Stuhlinger described the core group as “the most successful [technological] team in history. This was not just another team. The A-bomb, H-bomb, and Pickering [JPL rocket engine] teams all had a number of excellent individuals, but they were not a team in the same sense we were.”37 Longtime rocketeer Bernhard R. Tessman, whose association with von Braun dated back to 1935 and the German army’s Kummersdorf Proving Ground, could reminisce with him in 1972 about “the fine and loyal team you led through decades—an experience which will certainly not repeat in a man’s lifetime.”38
Von Braun always had high praise for the quality of the thousands of American-born, mostly young, engineers and scientists his organization had attracted in the 1950s and 1960s. He deflected suggestions that the team’s German nucleus was “smarter” than everybody else—especially after the group’s early successes in space on the heels of others’ spectacular failures. “It’s not that we’re geniuses,” he often insisted. “It’s just that we old-timers have been working on these things so long, we’ve had twelve more years to make mistakes and learn from them.”
For the Marshall Center team, both German- and American-born, and its director, Project Apollo meant years of intense, nonstop effort. “Von Braun didn’t have a clock, as far as work went,” recalled MSFC manager Lee Belew. “When he had a driver, he would have a light on in the car and read going home. He would do a lot of writing then and at home, too [along with] conceptual design stuff.” During most of Apollo, the Marshall chief traveled three weeks of every month and “was . . . gone almost every weekend,” Belew remembered. “We all spent lots of weekends working Saturdays—for years. We traveled an awful lot at night and on weekends. There just wasn’t a lot of wasted time.”39
Von Braun set the pace, making maximum use of his time. A fast reader, he was constantly devouring books, articles, reports, and technical papers. Traveling to and from work he would listen to foreign-language tapes to improve his fluency. “He liked for people to apply themselves, maybe even reach beyond themselves,” recalled Bonnie Holmes. “He thought you should always be doing something. From him I learned that you could relax and at the same time stimulate your mental process by maybe doing word games.”40
Marshall manager David Newby recalled running into von Braun one day in Florida in the mid-1960s on his way from the beach at Cape Canaveral to their motel. “You said you were reading the book under your arm,” Newby reminded his boss years later, “which happened to be your daughter’s high school biology book. That was the beginning of the ‘let’s sell “Earth Resources” campaign’ by NASA.”41 (In 1966 the space agency began developing plans for a “manned space station” using remote sensors, photography, and other technical means for studying “Earth Resources” ranging from forests, agricultural crops, and mineral deposits to pollution, blight, and other environmental dangers. The resulting engineering data were applied later to Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station.)
A similar scene was painted by MSFC associate and friend Ruth von Saurma in a letter:
I remember . . . a hot Sunday afternoon in June 1969. Almost 100 degrees and no breeze on Lake Guntersville [near Huntsville]. Everyone else cooled off in the water or dozed in the shade. But not you! Stretched out in the scorching sun on top of your houseboat, you were completely immersed in a book on Greek history. Afterwards, you came up with the most vivid account of the advanced concepts of Greek society that I ever heard.42
During the Apollo buildup, von Braun used part of his office décor for making desired political points. His ninth-floor offices in the Marshall Center’s newly constructed Building 4200—dubbed “the von Braun Hilton,” to his annoyance—contained a low table near his desk. The table held a display of about a dozen scale-model rockets. Beginning with his old wartime V-2, standing less than a foot tall, the models grew progressively taller through the Redstone, Jupiter, Atlas, Saturn I, Saturn IB, and finally the towering Saturn V—which was taller than his ceiling. Von Braun had a hole cut there and a recessed compartment built to receive the payload end—the Apollo spacecraft, managed by NASA’s Texas center.
“It was a big joke with him,” recalled colleague William R. Lucas. “He would laugh with visitors and tell them he didn’t want them to see all that expensive new Apollo spacecraft hardware up there and compare it to the old Houston capsule hardware. He’d say the Marshall stuff—the launch vehicle—was the good stuff, anyway.”43
Apollo-Saturn involved the work of some 375,000 people at twenty thousand companies, large and small. NASA itself had a peak employment of about thirty-four thousand government personnel during the 1960s. Roughly 90 percent of NASA’s budget went to private contractors. Critics of the Apollo effort called it a “Moondoggle” and denounced the spending of billions of dollars “on the Moon” instead of helping the needy and other earthly causes. Von Braun wearied of such talk and fired back: “The NASA budget is not being spent on the Moon. It is, rather, being spent right here on Earth. It provides new jobs, new products, new processes, new companies, and whole new industries.”44
As if von Braun did not have enough problems during the race to the Moon, even the generally supportive news media at home occasionally made waves. His Marshall public relations chief and other managers at times grew tired of the local press breaking stories before official news releases came out. On occasion, von Braun was drawn into the teapot-sized tempests. In December 1965, for instance, two senior MSFC officials met privately with the publishers of the Huntsville Times, the afternoon daily, and its smaller morning competitor, the Huntsville News, to request they hold off on reporting certain upcoming developments at Marshall until it could inform employees. Before any word was passed down to Times editors—if ever it was going to be—I, as the paper’s aerospace reporter, got wind of the plans and wrote a couple of articles about it.
Hand-wringing over the perceived betrayal ensued in certain MSFC offices. In an executive memo that MSFC manager James T. Shepherd sent to von Braun, Shepherd proposed that the newspaper get “the silent treatment—dry them up on news releases and stories”; that future NASA releases would come out “after the Huntsville Times deadline for a specific day,” thus favoring its AM competitor; and that “the removal of Ward’s badge” for MSFC access would occur. In the end, cooler heads prevailed, especially von Braun’s. To the memo’s reference to cutting off the paper from releases and story sources, he penciled the notation: “This doesn’t seem to work too well. Now they are getting their stories from Sen. [John] Sparkman or NASA HQ.” Except possibly for the timing of a handful of subsequent news releases, none of the retaliatory measures was taken.45
Von Braun knew that his vast MSFC organization, despite being NASA’s largest center, with nearly eight thousand of its own personnel plus tens of thousands of contractor workers, was not the center of world attention during Project Apollo. Even with its Saturn super-rockets, the Huntsville facility was no match for Cape Canaveral, with its fire-and-thunder magic at T-minus-zero, or the MSC in Houston with its right-stuff astronauts.
Still, at a dinner meeting one evening in Houston, von Braun was surprised to see a film on the Apollo effort that made no mention of the Marshall Center or its role in the coming lunar expeditions. Speaking after dinner, he pointed out the omission and then jibed: “Compared to the astronauts, our Saturn has about as much sex appeal as Lady Godiva’s horse!”46
Tragedy struck the Moon-landing project with the deaths of Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, West Pointer Edward H. White, and the rookie, Lt. Roger B. Chaffee, U.S. Navy, inside their sealed spacecraft in a January 27, 1967, fire during a supposedly routine checkout at the Cape Kennedy (formerly Canaveral). Von Braun was at a dinner in Washington with hard-driving NASA Administrator Jim Webb (who had replaced Glennan), MSC director Bob Gilruth, and other top NASA officials when everyone got the shocking news. To the press, the Marshall Center chief lamented “the loss of three good friends and valiant pioneers. Their deaths brought to mind the Roman saying ‘per aspera ad astra’—‘a rough road leads to the stars.’”
Back in Huntsville, von Braun wrote a personal note of condolence and encouragement to Gilruth. Webb soon appointed von Braun’s longtime chief deputy, the witty but hard-nosed engineer Eberhard Rees, to head a troubleshooting team to investigate problems with the Apollo spacecraft design and manufacture by the contractor, North American Rockwell’s Space Division, and to recommend corrections.
The deaths cast a pall of guilt and gloom over the NASA field center in Texas that would hang there for months. Von Braun helped the Houston space family come out of it. In a meeting at the Texas center, MSC chief of Public Affairs Paul Haney suggested that it was time for a let’s-get-this-show-back-on-the-road party, with drinks and dinner and laughs, “to kind of come out of mourning, which we’d been in for months,” he recalled. They picked a date in early May marking the sixth anniversary of Alan Shepard’s space trip aboard Mercury-Redstone. They would roast Shepard, who had been grounded ever since by a heart murmur and made head of the Astronaut Office. They would show a gag film, “How to Succeed in Space without Really Flying Much,” and have invited speakers roast “Smilin’ Al.”
The lone invitee from Huntsville was von Braun. He readily accepted. As Haney remembered it:
Wernher made one of the most interesting talks I think I ever heard him make in public—not that he ever made any bad talks, but he was particularly wrenching that night. He gave one of those typical von Braun, big-chin type of let’s-go-back-out-there-and-get-’em-in-the-second-half talks. He would have topped Bobby Knight that night. He came on strong, but he knew what we were trying to do and he did it very well.
I will never forget a syllogism that he used. . . . He said, in quoting one of his colleagues: “I think we should all understand that we are not in the business of making shoes.” And he delivered it with a certain contempt. . . . He meant only that our work was on a higher plane, involving certain high risks and dangers, and he did it with extraordinary emphasis.47
The May 6 evening affair was “a great success,” recalled Haney. “People started going off to parties again and being human beings again.” And a tighter-knit space agency began moving ahead to a successful first Saturn-Apollo manned flight less than eighteen months later. At last, Luna truly beckoned.