The Project Apollo push to the Moon was the driving force for Wernher von Braun during the 1960s. It required leadership, management, politicking, promotion, and teaching, yet it was not all consuming. He also enjoyed recreation with his family, as well as scuba diving, hunting, flying, deep-sea diving in a “magic submarine,” and travel.
Von Braun had discovered skin diving in his youth in Germany and resumed that sport in the 1950s during trips to Florida and California. Heeding the advice of writer Arthur C. Clarke, he graduated to the scuba version and enjoyed it over the years in the Florida Keys, Mexico, the Bahamas, the Aegean, at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and other places. He delighted in exploring caves and gullies, hunting submerged artifacts, photographing the deep-blue scenery and dazzling sea life, and fishing with a speargun. He liked the sport, he said, because it, along with piloting airplanes, “seems to give me a mastery of the third dimension.”1
Von Braun figured—rightly—that he could go scuba diving during breaks in the work schedule on some of his frequent trips to Cape Canaveral. One of aerospace engineer-manager James S. Farrior’s “most enjoyable experiences” was a diving side trip with von Braun to the Florida Keys after a rocket launch. It was on that speargun-fishing trip, he wrote von Braun, that he “realized for the first time the unlimited energy you possess. Your spear went into every hole and you didn’t let up until all the air tanks were empty and everybody else had long since stretched out, exhausted, on the deck.”
Preparing to head back to land at dusk, the divers discovered their boat’s engine was kaput. The take-charge von Braun slid into a tethered dinghy and used “its pitifully small outboard motor” to tow the larger boat slowly landward. As Farrior observed to his old colleague, “What a change from the tremendous power you had unleashed at the firing at Cape Canaveral a few days before!”
When the group at last made landfall at a pier, they faced an armed guard who refused to let them come ashore in the darkness. The pier belonged to an entrepreneur salvaging a nearby sunken Spanish galleon, and he didn’t want any strangers snooping around his treasure. Much discussion ensued between von Braun and the hired gun before they were finally allowed to come ashore.2
Ernst Stuhlinger recalled one summer day in von Braun’s earlier diving years, when he, von Braun, Gerhard Heller, and several other ex-Peenemünders formed “a happy gang” of skin divers aboard a small motorboat headed from Long Beach, California, to the kelp beds off Catalina Island.
Tom, owner of the boat and the diving gear, explained how to put on mask and fins, how to get seawater out of eyes and nose, how to descend and ascend, and how to use the speargun. Finally, he assumed a serious pose and said: “Fellows, now listen: There are moray eels down there. Those beasts are vicious. They are not for you. I want you to steer clear of them! Do you hear me?” We said, “Yes, sir,” because we had heard him. And we donned the gear, sat on the rim, and plunged backward into the blue water.
After a little while, you surfaced and headed for the boat, pulling heavily at the line of your gun. When you finally heaved your catch aboard, we were all stunned: It was an enormous, vicious-looking moray eel! Bursting with excitement, you told us the story at least seven times—how you first saw the head of the beast in a crevice, how you swam right toward it, and how your spear hit it through its powerful neck.
Tom did not say a word. He felt that here was a man who did not need instructions and who was immune to the pitfalls of life that endanger lesser men. But the luster in his eyes was eloquent enough; it betrayed nothing but pride and admiration.3
Scuba and skin diving were interests von Braun also shared with his friend Walter Cronkite. In a happy birthday letter to the rocketeer, Cronkite confessed to harboring “a secret admiration for a man whose life has been devoted to getting to the stars, and whose hobby is getting to the bottom of a shallow lagoon!”4
Sailing and deep-sea diving vessels were other mutual interests of the two men. Von Braun was “terribly interested” in exploration of the sea as a “new frontier,” and he and Cronkite “had a mutual deep interest in that and a mutual friend in Ed Link,” an innovator of undersea equipment (and earlier the inventor of the Link Pilot Trainer). Cronkite said he and von Braun dived on several memorable occasions in the 1960s, although separately, with Link in his four-person submarine, “Deep Diver,” which Cronkite called a “magic submarine.” “Wernher and I talked more about that than we did space,” remembered a laughing Cronkite. “Everything about space had been said, practically, between us. But exploration of the sea was so new back then. It was new to Wernher, too, so he had a fascination with it.”5
Hunting was another of the rocket scientist’s favorite pastimes during the 1960s. With friends in the Huntsville area and elsewhere, he shot pheasant, dove, quail, duck, geese, and wild turkey. A good shot, he also hunted bigger game—deer, antelope, caribou, moose, jaguar, bear—when opportunities arose. The Episcopal minister of his family’s church in Huntsville, the Reverend A. Emile Joffrion, invited von Braun to accompany him one weekend in the early 1960s on a big deer hunt near Greensboro in southern Alabama. The site was a plantation of several thousand acres that belonged to a friend of the priest who was the publisher of the local newspaper, descendant of the state’s first Episcopal bishop, and a gentleman known for his salty language and squirrel’s head soup. Joffrion recalled:
Our host, Hamner Cobb, had an old green pickup truck that he drove sixty, seventy miles an hour through the woods and across the pastures to where we’d hunt. And God have mercy on you if you weren’t sitting up front with him. Most people had to ride in the back of the truck, of course. Well, we were getting ready to load up, and one of our host’s field lieutenants who helped run these hunts said, “Hamner, you better put Dr. von Braun up front in the cab with you. He . . .” “Hell, no!” Cobb interrupted. “Let him ride in the back like everybody else!”
Well, Wernher laughed. He loved it. I think it was the phrase “like everybody else” that appealed to him. He was treated with such deference everywhere he went and probably was ready to be “one of the boys.”6
So von Braun climbed in the back of the battered pickup with the dogs, the black “drivers” who helped with the hunt, and several other hunters. “And Wernher just had a great time,” Joffrion remembered. It was the first of several deer hunts they enjoyed together, in Arkansas as well as Alabama.7
A frequent bird-shooting host and field companion of von Braun was Harry Moore Rhett Jr., a Huntsville community leader, cotton planter, and fox-hunting master. During the Apollo buildup, von Braun was his guest on one of many bird shoots they experienced over the years. The scientist had a thoroughly frustrating off day with his shotgun, taking numerous shots but hitting nothing all day. “The thought occurred to me,” remembered the gentlemanly Rhett, “but I resisted the temptation to tell him, ‘Wernher, I hope your aim at the Moon is better than this!’”8
Von Braun’s chance at jaguar hunting in Yucaán came in the 1960s at the invitation of Fairchild Industries’ Edward Uhl. The hunt was hastily arranged after friends of the aerospace industrialist who were cutting mahogany deep in the interior had reported sighting the big cats in the jungle. Von Braun and Uhl had flown down and then made their way by jeep to the lumber camp. Informed that the animals had last been seen at a nearby lake, the two hunters left at dusk in the old jeep and two armed Mayan guides who spoke no English. At the lake, the rocket scientist headed on foot to one side with a guide, and Uhl took the other side.
An hour later, in darkness—the best time to see the bright shining eyes of the jaguars—loud howling and growling sounds suddenly erupted! The hunters had no idea what in blazes the beastly noises were and could not communicate with their guides. Uhl figured he had better return to the jeep. There he found an excited von Braun waiting. “Ed, Ed, what were those awful noises?” he asked. Uhl said he hadn’t a clue.
Back at camp, the hunters got their answer—and chuckles from their hosts. The animals making the ungodly raucous sounds were howler monkeys. The two men had not bagged any jaguar, but they would have stories to take home. After dinner that night in camp, Uhl returned to their experience with the vocal monkeys. “Isn’t it amazing, probably unique, that these creatures with only a loud voice can be so frightening?”
“Wernher leaned over with a twinkle in his eye and said, ‘Ed, haven’t you ever appeared before a congressional committee?’”9
The decade also saw von Braun indulge his passion for piloting airplanes. Not everyone knew that, from his teenage years on, he had been a serious pilot. Beginning with gliders as a youth, he had flown military aircraft in the 1930s during two prewar hitches in the German air force reserve. In the 1960s he grew practically obsessive about it, flying anything and everything he could get his hands on: small planes, multiengine aircraft, executive jets, fighter planes, old converted bombers, seaplanes, gliders, and every imaginable sort of aircraft and spacecraft simulator.
Although he never owned an airplane, von Braun’s job as the boss at NASA’s Marshall Center gave him ample opportunity to use the government-owned aircraft assigned to his organization, plus leased and chartered planes. But all that was just for starters. “Sometimes on contractor plant visits, especially in St. Louis at McDonnell Douglas,” associate Lee Belew recalled, von Braun “would slip off and be out there flying with one of their pilots to see how a new jet fighter was. He was a real pilot. He loved to fly.”10
An aviator with an overactive sense of mischief, the rocket man delighted in giving his passengers cheap thrills—especially newcomers who were unaware of his piloting skills and already nervous about an amateur handling the controls. David Newby was aboard the center’s twin-engine Gulfstream aircraft one clear day on a 1960s trip out West when the MSFC director flew the plane “through, not over but through, the Grand Canyon.” Flying below the canyon’s rim, von Braun reveled in “pointing out various items of interest such as, ‘Look up and to your right to see the Indian village.’”11
On another occasion, flying the Gulfstream with a load of Marshall employees to Seattle to begin a major series of visits to West Coast aerospace contractors, von Braun headed for a Strategic Air Command base in South Dakota to refuel. NASA’s Jay Foster remembered the episode well: “In the process of coming down to land at this SAC base, we passed Mount Rushmore. Wernher was flying. He decided to buzz Rushmore, and we went down very close. He banked that plane up on its side so that the passengers on the port side had ‘a good view’ of it.”
“I never did see those carved faces,” Foster recalled telling von Braun afterward. “I don’t remember what Mount Rushmore looked like. It was August, and I was too busy watching all those tourists down there staring up at this crazy airplane on its side!”12
It just so happened that shortly after the Marshall Center received its much-sought-after twelve-seat Gulfstream turbo-prop plane (the first of four such transports that NASA ordered), the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) issued a regulation. It required anyone piloting a multiengine plane above a certain weight, with passengers, to have an ATR (Airline Transport Rating) for that plane, even if he or she was checked out to fly it. Von Braun’s professional contract pilots, all properly certified, broke the news to him: To stay legal at the Gulfstream’s controls, he must have an ATR. Pilot Edward “Skeets” Grubbs remembered the space scientist’s determined response: “I get me vun.” Then, “Vhat must I do to get this?”13
The contract pilots explained to “the doctor,” as they called him, that he must pass an extensive written test, attend flight school for a week, complete simulator tests, and then pass a demanding FAA flight check. The pilots began gathering flight manuals and other literature for him to study. Pilot George Fehler recalled that von Braun pored over the material for two or three hours a day during a trip abroad, came back, took the written test, and scored high. Von Braun and Fehler then traveled to New York for the test on the Gulfstream flight simulator. The checkout included some complicated prop settings for different situations. “He was good—the best one that day” on the sophisticated system, Fehler said of von Braun’s performance.14
Finally, it was time for the flight check. They flew the Marshall Center’s “G1” to the Savannah-Charleston area.15 The FAA inspector, impressed that the famous space scientist had progressed this far, came aboard. Fehler went along for the ride. “The doctor took the flight check and did everything they asked,” recalled the contract pilot. “There was only one hitch.” Flying in low-ceiling conditions, von Braun missed a landing approach and had to pull up suddenly, back into the clouds, after discovering he was headed for an inactive runway. The inspector said nothing. The situation involved a corrective action von Braun knew well. In a momentary quandary, however, he commented about being back “in the soup” to Fehler, who responded with a thinly veiled hint: “It’s like a ‘missed approach’ [to an active runway], isn’t it? [Von Braun] picked up on that real quick,” recalled his pilot friend, and made a full recovery.16
On the day in 1964 when von Braun’s ATR certificate arrived, he took his pilot friends out to dinner at a fine restaurant. He ordered chateaubriand and wine all around. “It was his treat,” recalled Ed Grubbs. “It was a thank you.”17
Von Braun had his share of close calls in the air.18 One of the most harrowing came during a flight with longtime associate Donald I. Graham Jr., and others. Shortly after takeoff in a NASA plane headed for Washington, von Braun had taken over the controls while the regular pilot handled the radio. Graham related the drama while reminiscing years later with the rocket scientist:
During the course of the trip we were all talking and the subject of piloting an airplane arose. The pilot commented that it was “95 percent sheer boredom and 5 percent stark terror.”
Shortly thereafter the pilot asked for clearance to land at National Airport. There were spotty clouds, but in general they said to come straight in. You lowered the nose to go down through a cloud. At that exact moment up out of the cloud came the nose of a DC-6 head on. You peeled our plane off to the right like an expert fighter pilot. If your thinking and reactions had not been so quick, none of us would now be celebrating birthdays.19
Moments after the near miss, recalled Graham, von Braun’s copilot asked, “Remember the 5 percent?” Then he verbally tore into the air traffic controller in the tower at National Airport.
Von Braun seized the chance to pilot a very different sort of craft during a Southern California work trip in the mid-1960s. On the flight west to visit several NASA contractor plants, he left the cockpit and sat beside Marshall Center engineer John C. Goodrum Sr. Von Braun asked about Goodrum’s plans for that evening. The engineer, one of whose current assignments was to stay abreast of new, alternative means of transportation, planned to visit the Newport Beach home of an inventor. The man had worked in several rocket programs, Goodrum added, but his consuming hobby was designing and building personal hovercraft in his garage.
“He just lit up with interest and excitement,” recalled Goodrum. Von Braun said he had committed to have dinner that night with a group of corporate VIPs but was weary of such occasions. “If you don’t mind, John,” he said, “I’d like to sneak out of the hotel and go with you.”
That evening von Braun slipped out of their Santa Monica hotel alone, disguised in “a trench coat and Dick Tracy hat pulled down over his eyes,” and waited for his getaway ride in the shadows of a building across the street, a laughing Goodrum recalled. When the engineer pulled up in his rental car, the furtive von Braun slid inside, and the two men headed for Newport Beach. Goodrum could only wonder what alibi his boss had used to duck the VIP dinner.
Reaching their destination, the pair found their host in his garage. Von Braun, who was knowledgeable about hovercraft, became immersed in conversation with the inventor about his work and the several working models he had engineered and built. They examined the hovercraft hardware in detail. They talked until midnight. Then the men hauled one model, a two-seater about twelve or fifteen feet long by six feet wide and resembling an inverted bathtub, out into the paved alley by the garage and cranked it up.
“Von Braun and the guy began flying it up and down the alley, back and forth, just inches above the pavement—back and forth!” Goodrum remembered. “It had a kind of skirt all around the bottom, with blower fans blowing air down and sideways. They kept flying it up and down that alley, back and forth, with von Braun having a great time.” At two o’clock in the morning Goodrum finally dragged the boss away.20
Von Braun believed, as did writer André Maurois, that “nothing is more agreeable than to travel.” He traveled widely throughout much of his life, taking delight in the adventures, new friends, and opportunities for learning it brought. His travels carried him from the jungles of Africa and the Yucatán to the icy Arctic and Antarctic regions, from the Grecian Isles to the British West Indies, from the Himalayas to the Alps—to every continent and reputedly every state in the United States.
Some of von Braun’s travels were more offbeat than others. A space-business trip to Nevada in the 1960s ended with him stage-side at a Las Vegas hotel-casino topless revue with his traveling party. The group had flown out to nearby Desert Rock to observe the test firing of a nuclear-powered rocket engine developed for a deep-space probe. When the firing was canceled because of wind direction—the contaminated exhaust clouds would have drifted down over Las Vegas—the group decided to head there. They scored reservations at the Tropicana for that night’s edition of the “Follies Bergere.” Marshall contract pilot Ed Grubbs remembered the evening in detail.
They marched us right around a big line of folks waiting to get in the show, and took us—the doctor and the whole group—right down to a ringside table. I mean, it was up against the stage, the closest view possible. We were sitting there with all them bare-breasted gals right above us. The dancers were swinging their feathers out over our group. They seemed to be playing to our table, either because we were closest or they knew the doctor was there.21
“Yeah,” added pilot George Fehler, “the doctor was sitting there, real close to the stage, and those dancers were coming by with those feathers—and he was allergic to feathers.” Grubbs picked up the narrative: “And the closer those topless gals got with their feathers, the more he scooted his chair back. They’d get closer, he’d scoot—anything to avoid red eyes and a sneezing attack!”22
Von Braun’s work gave him opportunities to combine business travel with personal touring. He did just that in the early 1960s on his grandest journey of all. His trip mate called it “our ‘round-the-world odyssey,” and it lasted two and a half weeks in December 1961 and January 1962. Dr. Carsbie C. Adams, a hospital administrator, space author, fellow pilot, and outdoorsman from Georgia, had known von Braun since 1954. Adams recalled that the plan was hatched during a weekend quail-hunting outing with von Braun at the Georgian’s antebellum plantation in Culloden, south of Atlanta; the whole von Braun family often joined in horseback riding and other outdoor fun there.
Von Braun mentioned that he had been invited to give a university lecture series in Australia and asked his friend to accompany him. Adams needed to arrange a business meeting in London about then, and he knew that von Braun wanted to visit his father in Germany. Adams had an idea: Why not make it an around-the-world trip? Von Braun agreed. He yearned to see India, the Himalayas, and Thailand, and this might be his best shot. Project Apollo could spare him for a few days around the holidays at year’s end. Soon he and Adams had their globe-circling itinerary: Huntsville/Atlanta to New York to London, then Munich, brief stops in Istanbul, Beirut, and Tehran, then visits to New Delhi, other Indian cities, Kathmandu in Nepal, Bangkok, Sydney, a return stop in Honolulu, then Los Angeles, and back home.
Von Braun found their visits to the Taj Mahal and other magnificent structures in India humbling, recalled Adams. Guides told the two visitors of the many thousands of men working night and day for years and years at these sites and using the most advanced building techniques and designs. “Von Braun was very impressed and touched by the thought of such undertakings,” Adams remembered. He said von Braun commented along the lines of: We think we are doing this wonderful, enormous effort with the Moon-landing program. But these building projects in India long ago rivaled it, considering the resources expended and the technology available then.23
The visit to Nepal, high in the Himalayas, proved to be a highlight of the trip. The pair flew to the mountain kingdom from India aboard a DC-3 airliner. It was, the plane’s captain explained to them in the cockpit, the only transport then reliably capable of landing—at a mere 85 mph—and taking off in the thin air at the 3,600-foot-long airstrip serving Kathmandu. They touched down in a fertile valley green with tea fields. The two marveled at the valley’s sunny beauty, semitropical vegetation, and temperatures so balmy they had to shed outer layers of clothing. It was the dead of winter—January 1, 1962—and all around were snow-covered mountain peaks. “We were completely stunned to find that it was extremely warm, dry, and fantastically beautiful,” related Adams, who chronicled the global journey in a journal. At first, all he and von Braun could do was stare and take photographs of the astounding scenery.
Further surprises awaited them in Kathmandu and nearby towns. They visited a succession of ancient Buddhist and Hindu temples, temples with domes covered in gold, one with two thousand carved wooden Buddhas, the magnificent temple of Swayumbhunath atop a hill with a thousand steps, and yet another with an endless array of colorful wooden carvings depicting every human sexual act and position imaginable. In a house of worship, the visitors mused. Interesting.
Leaving the Temple of One Thousand Steps in Kathmandu, they noticed a scene that aroused von Braun’s “great compassion,” recalled Adams. Gathered nearby were several dozen of the most miserable, hopeless-looking people the pair had ever seen. They were refugees who had recently fled their new Chinese Communist occupiers in neighboring Tibet. They “had walked and crawled across the Himalayas to this valley,” Adams recalled. “We must do something!” von Braun told his friend. The two men pooled all their cash, changed it into Nepalese currency, and methodically pressed equal amounts into the hands of each member of the ragged group.24 The money was eagerly accepted.25
Von Braun believed that one’s religious faith must be accompanied by deeds. It was not enough merely to feel compassion for others. During a late-1960s vacation cruise he took with Maria to Greece and the Aegean Islands, a Greek mayor, excited to have the von Brauns visit his small town, gave them the red-carpet treatment. It eventually came up in conversation that the mayor was suffering from heart disease and needed multiple-bypass surgery. The operation was not readily available then in Greece, and in any event it would be far too costly for the mayor.
According to Tom Shaner, “Dr. von Braun took it upon himself to arrange for complimentary surgery for the mayor in Houston” by the celebrated Texas heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey, a friend. “There were no doctors’ bills, no hospital bills.” And it was successful.26
Back home during the high-flying 1960s, von Braun spent most weekends and what time otherwise his heavy business travel and high adventures would allow with Maria and their three children. Friends said it was not as much as he would have liked, nor as much as his family wanted. But along with pursuing urgent space goals, von Braun was intent on experiencing life to the fullest. His wife understood him, and by all accounts felt he did not indulge in his after-hours exploits to excess. He fit many of these personal pursuits—scuba diving, pleasure flying, yachting, and the like—into his workweek travels. When he couldn’t, then his time at home just might come up short.
Some of his more exotic travels—to Antarctica, Nepal/India/Thailand, Alaska, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—were taken with friends and associates. Other such journeys—to Africa, the Aegean Islands, Hawaii, India again, and back to Alaska—were with Maria and, on occasion, the children.
Summertime trips to Cape Canaveral for missile or space launches at times meant that his wife and children went too, to enjoy the ocean and beaches. But on balance, von Braun’s heavy travel schedule often seemed seriously out of balance to his family. During one absence, it was Maria who had to help son Peter fashion his small “Pinewood Derby” wooden racecar for Cub Scouts. The peripatetic papa in the late 1950s had confessed in one of his many speeches to business conventions: “My two daughters keep telling me to quit my job, buy a drugstore, and stay at home!”
Still, there were the countless spring, summer, and fall weekends spent tooling around in his ChrisCraft motorboat Orion, water-skiing, and swimming with his family on Lake Guntersville, or simply lounging aboard their small houseboat moored at the marina and helping young son Peter sharpen his fishing skills. Von Braun taught his children how to swim, dive, and water-ski, “and probably did a better job than a swim instructor could have,” wrote eleven-year-old Margrit in a 1963 classroom essay.
He supported Margrit in her passion for horseback riding. She wrote: “Daddy bought me a horse [Susie]. Occasionally he rides her. He takes me up to the stable often and watches me ride. . . . He goes to nearly every horse show that I am in.” He encouraged daughter Iris in learning to play the cello. And he kept his promise to take Maria on a cultural-social trip to New York at least once a year.
Von Braun’s outside income helped cover such expenses. There were the sometimes lucrative speaking appearances, articles, and books. Starting in January 1963 and for years afterward, he wrote a monthly—later bimonthly—piece in Popular Science. Longtime personal attorney Patrick Richardson in Huntsville advised him on several profitable investments. A Birmingham, Alabama, banker friend of Richardson’s was organizing a new bank in a neighboring county to Huntsville and sought von Braun’s presence on the board. On Richardson’s advice he became a director of the First State Bank of Decatur in the 1960s, and served well into the next decade. “He said in a joking way it gave him great pleasure to be a banker,” recalled the lawyer. “He said his wife’s father27 had been a prominent banker and always looked down on him!”28
At work in the 1960s, von Braun often extended his workday with “the boys”—his beer-loving, German-born senior colleagues—at a beer joint called the Top Hat Lounge. Proprietress Sarah Sanders Preston, who worked by day in a cafeteria out at the space center and knew the rocketeer bunch, opened the lounge in town in early 1964. Soon von Braun and company began quietly dropping in at the Top Hat at 5:00 or 5:30 many afternoons.
“Dr. von Braun would pull up first in our big gravel parking lot,” Preston remembered, “and then seven or eight of the other doctors would arrive. They’d all follow him inside and head straight for our stockroom in back, where all the beer was stored. Only American beer. They would drink the beer hot in there and talk and draw all over the beer cases—rocket designs and things.” Then, after an hour or so, von Braun would open the door and invite Preston in to count the empty beer bottles he had neatly lined up so that they could pay her.
The whole routine, week after week, never varied as long as von Braun remained in Huntsville. After he left, the Germans stopped coming by the Top Hat. And Sarah Preston, years after she sold the lounge in 1987, still wished she’d saved those beer-carton drawings.29
Von Braun’s primary jobs during the Apollo era, of course, were as leader and manager. He led not only NASA’s largest field center but also the broader effort to help inspire public support nationally—and internationally—for mankind’s new cosmic strivings. He had been “a man with a driving force” in the mid-1950s, Col. Edward D. Mohlere, U.S. Army (Ret.), recalled. “It was evident in everything he did. Then, of course, came the ‘man on the Moon in this decade.’ That was the schedule he had, and he was going to make it, come hell or high water.”30
In addition to his management duties, he made speech after speech touting the space program, specifically Project Apollo, to citizens around the country, to politicians, and to students. Representative Olin E. “Tiger” Teague of Texas, chairman of the House Science and Astronautics Committee and one of von Braun’s best buddies on Capitol Hill, lauded him after a Texas speaking tour as “really a spellbinder when it comes to making a presentation. Your ability to adapt your subject to the type [of] audience, whether scientists, high school children, or businessmen, is outstanding.”31 Von Braun was simply “a great salesman,” recalled Lee B. James, a senior associate at the Marshall Center. “He was so good at it, he could make a speech on any subject and be really good.”32
He took a special interest in speaking to college science, math, and engineering students he might attract to his rocket team in Alabama. One such collegian was Harry Atkins. At the lone school in his coal-mining hometown of Van, West Virginia, in the early 1950s, Atkins had read a book by Willy Ley on rockets and future space travel. It sold young Atkins on a career in science and technology. He took every math and physical science course available in high school and then in a work-study program at a two-year college, alternating work in the coal mines with classroom semesters. He then enrolled at MU (Marshall University) in Huntington and majored in physics.
One day in 1961 von Braun visited the MU campus. “He came and gave this lecture and drew the V-2, basically, and trajectories and such,” Atkins recalled. “Then at the end he said, in his German accent, ‘I want all of you to come to Huntsville. We’re going to the Moon and beyond!’ I never will forget it. He was like a pied piper. The students dubbed him ‘the space pied piper.’ I was in the process then of graduating and [job] interviewing. I turned down a position with IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, and headed south to join von Braun.”33 NASA physicist Harry Atkins made a career at the Marshall Center, with no regrets.34
Capitol Hill, too, saw much of von Braun’s salesmanship. In hearings, he was often the star witness, keeping the members of Congress and their committee staffs informed on Saturn-Apollo progress and problems, and helping to keep those budgetary billions coming. “Wernher was a very charismatic individual, anyway,” recalled colleague William H. Pickering of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “In fact, he is the only witness at a congressional hearing I’ve ever heard of that, whenever he came into the room, all the congressmen came down to shake his hand.”35
Von Braun invested a lot of time and energy in cultivating the friendship and favor of Teague and the other Washington powerhouses who held the space purse strings and levers of programmatic authority. He went on hunting trips with them, delivered countless requested speeches in their districts, and gave them the red-carpet treatment on visits he encouraged to the Marshall Center. And if they journeyed to New Orleans to inspect the vast Michoud plant for Saturn rocket booster fabrication, which Marshall oversaw, he cemented friendly relationships by making the ultimate sacrifice: He joined them on a rollicking night out in the Big Easy’s French Quarter.
Not that every politician fell under von Braun’s spell in the 1960s. He sometimes bumped up against Capitol Hill denizens jealously protecting their state’s piece of the space pie. Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, for one, was a grizzly when it came to guarding the interests of his Mississippi Test Facility. That was the $500-million NASA site carved out of backwater acreage in the southern part of his state and placed under von Braun and the Marshall Center’s control early in Project Apollo. Von Braun found out just how protective Stennis could be during a visit the senator paid him. The Mississippian mainly wanted a heart-to-heart talk with von Braun in the latter’s office, recalled James T. Shepherd, Marshall facilities chief. After updating Stennis on the center’s programs and capabilities, von Braun insisted on giving him the grand tour of the Huntsville center’s impressive facilities.
Stennis remained poker-faced through it all, Shepherd remembered. Standing atop a huge static-test stand for Saturn booster stages, the powerful senator looked straight at his host and said: “Dr. von Braun, I really don’t care what you do here in Huntsville. Just don’t take it out of Mississippi.”36 End of message. Shepherd’s reaction: “I thought, man, in Mississippi politics, they don’t mince words.”37
Politician von Braun often played the role of teacher, too, not only to the thousands of high school and college students he spoke to around the nation but also to the junior members of his team. NASA engineer-manager James B. Odom vividly remembered a lesson on anvil clouds that von Braun gave him during a mid-1960s flight from the West Coast back to Huntsville. Aboard a leased Lear jet, flying at forty-one thousand feet over Kansas, the Marshall Center contingent encountered just such a cloud and had to fly around the enormous, dangerous formation. Von Braun, a master on the subject of weather, left the cockpit, sat down beside young Odom, and proceeded to give him an exhaustive explanation of every aspect of anvil clouds, out of a desire “to share that knowledge he had with me . . . a young engineer,” said Odom.38
Another time he gave an all-night astronomy lesson, remembered NASA veteran Jay Foster. On a late-1960s trip to California to visit several aerospace contractors, von Braun and a group of associates planned a last stop at the famed Mount Palomar observatory. The Marshall Center was then in the design phase of Skylab, the nation’s first manned orbital station, using leftover Saturn launch vehicles and other hardware. Skylab would be an astronomical observatory in space, among many other things, and von Braun wanted his team to have a better understanding of the closest thing to it on Earth: Palomar.
The entourage received first-class treatment, Foster recalled: a catered dinner, followed by a tour; a briefing on Palomar’s design, construction, capabilities, and achievements; and a comprehensive lecture by a visiting university astronomer on the subject of white dwarfs, or dying stars, in their last stage. It was after midnight when the visitors headed back down the mountain for the Marine Corps base where their plane awaited them for departure the next morning. Von Braun told Foster that he had “gotten all stirred up with the lesson on white dwarfs, and that once we got back to Camp Pendleton, he felt like giving everybody a general astronomy lesson. Of course, nobody would refuse that.”
Arriving at the base around 1:30 AM, recalled Foster, “we all went to von Braun’s room and he lectured us on astronomy practically all night. Everyone was sitting there and he was really warmed up. He was enthusiastic about it, as he was about almost anything he got to talking about.” The men got little sleep that night. At daybreak they straggled into the camp’s mess hall for breakfast, made their way onto the NASA plane, and took off toward home. Then they slept.39
As the director of the Marshall Center all through the 1960s, von Braun devoted vast amounts of his time to directing: managing, chairing meetings, fostering internal communications, making decisions, and getting daunting jobs done within deadlines. Although something of a hands-off manager where pure administration was involved, von Braun was the ultimate hands-on manager in engineering matters. He haunted his center’s technical labs and shops and drafting rooms and the innards of contractors’ plants as well. He preached individual responsibility and absolute perfection of product, having learned the hard way in the rocket and satellite business that near perfection “is the equivalent of disaster.” Earlier, he had said of his team’s satellite launcher: “We were almost cocky about our equipment. We had to be, because we knew that there is no ’98 percent successful’ satellite launching.”40 It either reached orbit—the proper orbit—or it did not.
While he had his strengths as a manager, von Braun was less than perfect. He had an aversion to personally reprimanding or disciplining anyone on his team, usually leaving that to his deputy. He would overspend if not watched closely. At one point in the 1960s, he allowed the number of managers with direct access and reporting responsibility to him—including all his German-born lab directors and other technical chiefs—to reach thirty-eight, according to senior Marshall manager Lee B. James.41 Eventually, von Braun was persuaded to correct the situation. Against resistance, he ordered the lab bosses to closet themselves and choose their own overlord of Marshall’s R & D operations, through whom they would report to von Braun between regular staff meetings. They were simply to inform him of their choice after his return from a vacation trip with his wife. “I won’t come back,” he added, “until I see ‘the white smoke’ of agreement,” as James T. Shepherd remembered it.42 The lab directors acquiesced, selecting one of their number, Hermann Weidner, for the superchief’s role. “Thereafter,” recalled team member Charles Lundquist, “von Braun used to introduce him as ‘my pope,’” chosen by his cardinals, the lab bosses.43
Von Braun was adept at choosing and keeping good people, however. He held regular and frequent meetings with his senior staff and others, and allowed all to be heard, interminably if need be. He had a knack for motivating people and keeping morale high. In any reorganization he was good at anticipating and personally handling difficult individual cases. He fostered the concept of “automatic responsibility,” empowering personnel at all levels to take part in the decision-making process.
And yet von Braun was also a decisive, action-oriented manager. He abhorred the indecision that too often besets bureaucracy. Jim Shepherd recalled the time when Hurricane Camille struck the Marshall-managed Mississippi Test Facility. The devastating 1969 storm took several lives among the rocket test center’s employees and their families. It destroyed homes and schools, and damaged the facility itself. The distraught MTF on-site manager, Jackson “Jack” Balch, quickly contacted von Braun’s executive staff up in Huntsville.
“Jack wanted help,” remembered Shepherd. “He told one of our managers, ‘We have to do something down here!’ Our man’s reaction was, ‘We’ll get a team down there and see what they need.’ But von Braun said, ‘They don’t need a survey. They know what they need. We are going to get a convoy together in the morning, and we are going down there and help.’” The disaster-relief convoy rushed construction equipment, radio gear, medicine, and other emergency aid to the storm-ravaged Test Facility and vicinity before the Mississippi National Guard showed up—and stayed for weeks. “I thought that was a lesson in action to meet a situation,” observed Shepherd. “It said: ‘Let’s [not] study about these things. . . . Get it fixed.’ And it was.”44
Occasionally, von Braun practiced the management philosophy of “Better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Von Braun and company conceived plans for a “neutral buoyancy simulator” at Marshall in the 1960s. The idea was to build a large water tank in which the microgravity conditions of space could be simulated. Engineers in diving spacesuits could use it to test flight-hardware designs for placing, say, foot restraints and handgrips for spacewalking astronauts. But this R & D tool would require a new building. Extra funding for it would be hard to come by and, if secured, would probably bring rigid congressional restrictions. So Marshall improvised. A “temporary building” was unilaterally erected with funds scrounged from existing accounts. The center used its own expert welders from in-house shops to fabricate the spacious—thirty-five feet in diameter by thirty-three feet deep—tank within.
Operations at the new facility got under way, and all was going well. NASA’s Houston center, which had belittled the scheme after learning of it, later extensively used the tank for astronaut training. When news of all this reached Congress, the Space Subcommittee sent word it wanted to inspect this new structure. “They came down, and we took them over to see it,” recalled facilities boss Jim Shepherd. “The big doors opened up, and these guys from Washington saw this massive, 1.3-million-gallon tank that von Braun had built on the cheap. He said it was just a piece of ‘equipment,’ not a ‘facility.’ They didn’t say anything then—not one word—but they later put a lot of restrictions on it.” Shepherd remembered von Braun saying to his inner circle: “You build the facility first, then take the slap on the wrist. But you have the facility. They are not going to burn it.”45
The tank proved a success as an engineering and training tool, Shepherd and others said. Rigged for lowering large structures inside, it was operated by scuba-qualified engineers at Marshall. Fifteen or more astronauts trained in it, as did several Soviet cosmonauts later. Navy SEALS used it, and aquanaut Jacques Piccard tried it out. Scuba enthusiast von Braun made frequent dives—as soon as a helmet ring large enough to accept his imposing head was found, recalled James Splawn, head of the tank staff.46 The tank offered a bonus not lost on the PR-minded von Braun: with viewing portholes on the sides, it became a popular stop on the center’s tour for visitors, especially when in use by astronauts or others.47
One of von Braun’s severest Apollo-era managerial challenges involved dealing with North American Rockwell, prime contractor for the S-2 second stage of Saturn V. The Marshall Center’s resident engineer at the company’s Downey, California, plant, where the S-2 stage was being developed and built, found himself shut out of the information flow on technical issues. Visiting Marshall groups were made to feel “very unwelcome” at Downey, recalled MSFC official Mohlere.
The problem stemmed in part from a clash of inbred management cultures—and of two titanic personalities. The von Braun team had a history, first with army missile agencies and then with NASA, of working in intimate contact with its contractors. North American Rockwell, the former North American Aviation, with its proud aircraft-building heritage, was accustomed to the air force system: agencies choose a contractor, specify what they want, write it into the contract, and then stand back and let the company perform. Von Braun and company were especially uneasy over the S-2 stage, whose power plant would burn higher-energy—and highly volatile—liquid hydrogen as fuel.
And as the Marshall team saw it, there was a significant further problem: the president of North American Rockwell’s Space Division, Harrison B. Storms Jr., “was known as ‘Stormy,’ and he was well-named,” remembered Mohlere. “He was a well-known, highly successful aeronautics engineer. . . . He also had some personal characteristics which tended to keep outside influence outside his plant.” Von Braun and his deputy director and unofficial chief engineer, Eberhard Rees, informed NASA higher-ups that “this system was compromising the program’s schedule, and that we wouldn’t make it if something wasn’t done,” related Mohlere, who worked directly for Rees. A resultant visit to Downey by a special contingent headed by a NASA headquarters official and including Rees, Mohlere, and others got a frosty welcome and found little to allay their concerns. But no major corrective actions came about.
A substantive flash point between the Marshall Center leadership—especially Rees—and Storms had not made for a loving relationship. Marshall strongly favored an S-2 stage design with separate bulkheads between the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks, for safety’s sake. North American and Storms argued for a common bulkhead for the two adjoining tanks, with a weight savings of about two tons. Storms had won that dispute.
Sometime around 1966, shortly after the group from MSFC’s headquarters made their unsatisfactory visit to the Downey plant, von Braun attended a meeting there with briefings on the S-2 program given by Storms and others representing the Space Division. Also in attendance were North American executive George Moore and other corporate honchos. When the briefings ended, “von Braun just got up and . . . said that the continued interference of the president of North American’s Space Division [Storms] was impossible if this program was to continue,” recalled Mohlere, who was present. Von Braun turned to face Storms. “He right then and there called for the resignation of Storms. There was dead silence [except for] a lot of gasping. That was a monumental thing . . . the most courageous thing he ever did” as a space leader-manager.48
Storms, however, remained in place. On a follow-up visit to the Downey plant, an unrelenting von Braun—the customer—tried another tack during a private walk between buildings with J. Leland Atwood, the head of North American. Only Jim Shepherd of Marshall Center accompanied them. Shepherd recalled von Braun’s blunt statement: “Lee, Stormy has got to go” and Atwood’s equally blunt reply: “We can’t replace him.” “And it ended there,” said Shepherd.49
Actually, it ended for Storms the next year. The trigger was the Apollo 1 spacecraft fire on January 27, 1967, and the deaths of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee during a dry-run countdown at Cape Kennedy for the first Apollo manned mission. The legendary North American executive’s Space Division was also the prime contractor—to NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center—for the command and service modules of the Apollo spaceship. Design flaws and evidence of shoddy workmanship later came to light. Schedule and budgetary shortcomings had been highlighted in a damning internal report made by NASA Project Apollo Director Sam Phillips in December 1965, but it did not surface until after the fatal fire. The principal heads to roll in 1967 were those of Joseph Shea, Apollo spacecraft manager at MSC, who was summarily transferred to NASA headquarters, and the president of North American’s Space Division. In addition, George M. Low, Shea’s immediate boss at MSC, had to step down a notch at the Texas center.
Three months after the fire, on May 1, Lee Atwood called a meeting and informed Storms he was being replaced and transferred to a staff job at company headquarters.50 Some said he got a raw deal; von Braun and Rees were not among them.51