Reaching the Moon and being the first to do so was of great importance, von Braun made clear as Project Apollo rolled on, but he also wanted people to understand that the nation stood to gain much in the process. Scientific advances and technological spin-offs would come, along with a boon to the national spirit, the opening of the gateway to the planets and stars, and the confirmation that humankind can do anything it sets its mind to.
During the Apollo push von Braun further observed: “The Moon is as much or as little a goal as the city of Paris was to Lindbergh on his immortal flight. After all, if all Lindbergh had wanted to do was to reach Paris, he could have taken a boat.”1
The race to beat the front-running Soviets in putting men on the Moon was deadly serious. Space-aviation author Martin Caidin had captured the mood earlier in the ’60s when he wrote: “There emerges a new note, an undercurrent in our nation’s lunar exploration program. That undercurrent is one of urgency. It may be that we will not realize our goal to be the first on the surface of the Moon, that the Soviet head start will be too much to overcome.”2
Building on the first Saturn I test flight in October 1961, the series of heavy-lift vehicle missions continued successfully in the apparently unstoppable march to the Moon. The ten unmanned flights of the Saturn I used both NASA-produced stages fabricated in the “Fab Lab” of the MSFC (Marshall Space Flight Center) and contractor-built hardware. Several of the sixteen-story-tall rockets carried scientific payloads such as the large, winged, Pegasus meteoroid-detection satellites. The Saturn I flights were followed by the first launch of the project’s even larger test bed rocket, the Saturn IB, in February 1966. It had a redesigned booster stage and a new second stage—the S-4BC—that would serve as the third stage of the goliath Saturn V.
The time arrived for the critical first “countdown demonstration test” of the Saturn V in mid-October 1967; it would lead to the giant vehicle’s first flight. In charge of the demo test was Peenemünde and Mittelwerk veteran Arthur Rudolph, director of the Saturn V Program Office at the Marshall Center. He was positioned in Launch Control at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. As several abortive attempts at the run-through were made, other Marshall officials monitored the situation in real time from the operations support facility in Huntsville. At long last, after repeated false starts and glitches, the full test was accomplished. Congratulatory calls flowed in to Rudolph on an intercom hotline. Listeners soon heard another caller come on the line from Huntsville.
“Arthur, congratulations on a successful test!”
“Who is this?” asked a weary Rudolph.
“This is Wernher.”
“Werner who?” asked Rudolph, still not recognizing the caller’s voice and knowing several “Werners” on the team back at Marshall (there were several Werners but only one Wernher, with an “h,” the classical German spelling).
“You [expletive unknown]! I am the one that goes to Washington and gets all the money for you to play your funny games!” the caller fired back.
Brief pause. “Oh, Wernher von Braun!” an embarrassed Rudolph replied at last.
Rudolph is said to have enjoyed a good laugh later with von Braun and others over the whole thing. At his retirement party, however, he became upset when some of his associates played a recording of the exchange.3
After Peenemünde and Mittelwerk, Rudolph had worked for the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss and Redstone from 1945 to 1960, and then spent almost a decade with NASA’s Marshall Center. His cherubic appearance and easy charm at social events belied a managerial toughness. Boeing-Huntsville space engineer-manager Gene Cowart recalled the day Rudolph unloaded on a member of his Saturn V staff who was unprepared at a meeting: “You do better, or I send you to Dr. Mueller and you’ll have blood on your face!”4 The staffer got up and left the meeting.5
Health problems—reported heart trouble, along with a palsy that caused his head to bob up and down, then drop and turn to one side—led Rudolph to retire in 1968. That was the year after the first Saturn V flight and after high honors for contributions to his adopted country’s defense and space efforts had been bestowed on him.
In retirement he and his wife moved to California to be near a daughter. There, separated from colleagues and friends, he was contacted in 1984 by investigators from the U.S. Justice Department’s OSI (Office of Special Investigations) assigned to hunt down Nazi war criminals. (Wernher von Braun had been dead seven years at that point, and many speculate that this action against Rudolph would never had occurred had his friend been alive in 1984.) After a voluntary interview with the OSI interrogators, Rudolph was informed that his own words about Mittelwerk and his role in the use of forced labor for V-2 production had incriminated him. He was threatened by OSI with prosecution, loss of pension, and more if he refused to cooperate, yet Rudolph did not consult anyone back in Huntsville for advice or help. His only counsel was an immigration lawyer whose name he had found in the yellow pages.6 Rudolph quietly signed papers agreeing to surrender his U.S. citizenship and return to Germany, while keeping his full U.S. government pension and all awards given him. He acknowledged no persecution of forced laborers at Mittlewerk.7
The action came to light only when Rudolph failed to show up for the Fort Bliss old-timers reunion in Huntsville that spring. Later that year OSI issued a news release on Rudolph’s deportation that characterized him as a Nazi war criminal, setting off a rush of interest from both detractors and supporters, who complained that he had not been given due process of law. Alabama’s Republican junior U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton applauded the action. Coming to Rudolph’s support were Alabama’s other senator, Democrat Howell Heflin, Huntsville’s City Council and its mayor, the local American Legion post, Rudolph’s Huntsville Lutheran pastor, the Rev. Curtis E. Derrick, as well as Maj. Gen. John Bruce Medaris, U.S. Army (Ret.), Rudolph’s ex-commander at Redstone Arsenal and then an Anglican bishop in Florida. Ex-Peenemünder Walter Haeussermann and others began collecting documentation to present to the Department of Justice for reconsideration of the case.8
In Germany, the Bonn government investigated Rudolph’s wartime past, absolved him of any war crimes, and restored his German citizenship. In Hamburg he grew increasingly embittered over his treatment by OSI and the U.S. justice system, especially because Washington had known of his Mittelwerk role when he was invited to work here in 1945. Encouraged by old rocket-team colleagues and others, he attempted to return via Canada in 1990 to overturn the agreement, regain his U.S. citizenship, and resume residency. After detention by Canadian Immigration, eight hours of questioning, and an extensive court hearing, Rudolph was found not guilty of the OSI allegations but was denied exit to the United States on points of immigration law. Arthur Rudolph died in Hamburg on January 1, 1996, at age eighty-nine.9
During the tense push for the Moon, a number of honors were conferred on von Braun. One of the happiest occasions came on June 6, 1967, when he and his family appeared at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where he was awarded the gold Langley Medal for his “creative vision” in advancing rocketry, for leading the way to America’s first Earth satellite, and for “technical leadership in development of the Saturn class of large launch vehicles.” In its fifty-nine years, the medal had been awarded to just twelve aviation and space pioneers, among them Orville and Wilbur Wright, Charles Lindbergh, Robert H. Goddard, and astronaut Alan Shepard. Von Braun was all smiles as he joined that short list.
Although Apollo’s objective was well on the way toward being achieved in the latter half of the 1960s, von Braun was gravely troubled. As early as 1966, well before the Apollo 11 attempt, Washington had begun to cut back the space program. This prompted von Braun to vent publicly, “Our main effort today is busily destroying the very capability that we have built up to put a man on the Moon.” He told reporters if the trend was not reversed, the nation might as well hang a sign on the Moon saying “Kilroy was here” and declare “the show is over.” In September 1967 he continued in the same worried vein: “To make a one-night stand on the Moon and go there no more would be as senseless as building a railroad and then making only one trip from New York to Los Angeles.”10
By early October 1968, the once-stricken Apollo spacecraft program was back on track and the Saturn V was up and flying. Von Braun, whose nature was to accentuate the positive, remained uncharacteristically gloomy over space budget cuts, and he continued to sound the alarm. In a high-profile magazine interview that month, he emphasized that, in contrast to the growing Soviet space program:
[NASA funding had] gone down and down and down for the last three years. ... It may surprise you to hear this, but for the last two years my main effort at the Marshall Center has been following orders to scrub the industrial structure that we had built up at great expense to the taxpayer, to tear it down again. The sole purpose seems to be to make certain that in 1972 nothing of our capability is left. That’s my main job at the moment. And we haven’t even put a man on the Moon yet.11
He blamed the slippage in space support on several factors: the draining war in Vietnam, other troubles abroad, “riots in the cities,” civil rights issues, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the long hiatus in both U.S. and Russian manned space flights. That lapse had caused some loss of American public interest. The sense of a quite real “Moon race” had disappeared, he said, replaced by the feeling that America was far ahead. “We aren’t ahead,” he emphasized.
By the time of that October 1968 interview, von Braun noted one especially troubling result of the slide in U.S. space priorities. “It is an awfully difficult thing for anybody participating in our lunar program to try to run as fast as he can if the environment is one of building down rather than building up. It is like being ordered to disarm while the war is still on.” What was really needed, von Braun appealed, “is sustained support of this space program over a great number of years. We must stop blowing hot and cold. This thing is for the long haul.”
And it does matter whether America or Russia is first to reach the Moon, he stressed. That feat “will not go unnoticed on earth,” and the “scientific status and technological quality of the two countries will be compared . . . for many years, perhaps for generations to come.” After all, von Braun observed, “Who remembers the second man to fly the Atlantic Ocean?”12
Von Braun did more than simply vent his anguish over the downturn in space funding in the latter half of the 1960s. While “intensely focused on the success of the planned lunar missions,” recalled space scientist Pat R. Odom, “he was concerned that . . . the U.S. taxpayers could see longer-term returns on their enormous investment in the Apollo program.” That meant “exploring ways the Apollo hardware—spacecraft and launch vehicle—and facilities might be adapted to other important space missions, manned or unmanned.”13 Maximizing Apollo’s returns would also strengthen von Braun’s hand politically in his pitches to Congress and the public.
For example, von Braun conceived of exploring Jupiter with a large unmanned craft built from elements of the Apollo lunar lander and launched by a Saturn V, Odom later pointed out. That concept was passed for feasibility study through Marshall’s laboratory system to a contractor, Northrop Services in Huntsville, where Odom headed the advanced studies team. The resulting study led to a favorable report, which led years later to NASA’s spectacularly successful Galileo mission to Jupiter.14
Amid von Braun’s angst over the impact of budget reductions, the spectacu-lar first launch and flight of an unmanned Saturn V on November 20, 1967, had gone well. So had the last of five Saturn IB flights, almost a year later, in October 1968, which was also the first in that series to carry an astronaut crew. In their Apollo 7 warm-up for the first manned Saturn V flight, ex-navy test pilot Wally Schirra, Marine Corps flier Walter Cunningham, and U.S. Naval Academy graduate-turned-U.S. Air Force pilot Donn Eisele had flown aboard the new spacecraft in Earth orbit. And during the memorable Christmas 1968 flight, Saturn–Apollo 8 made history in carrying air force pilot Frank Borman, U.S. Naval Academy alumnus Jim Lovell, and fellow Annapolis graduate Bill Anders on ten swings around the Moon and back home; they took turns reading passages on creation from the book of Genesis.
Next came the Apollo 9 flight of the all-air force crew of James McDivitt, David Scott, and (by then, civilian) Russell “Rusty” Schweickart in March 1969 in an Earth-orbit shakedown test of the spacecraft’s command-service and lunar modules. Then, in a May dress rehearsal for the big show, on stage strode the Apollo 10 astronauts: Thomas Stafford, former U.S. Air Force test pilot leader; Cdr. John Young, U.S. Navy, two-time Gemini veteran; and Cdr. Eugene Cernan, U.S. Navy, Gemini 9 pilot and the future “last man on the Moon.” They were boosted by a Saturn V into lunar orbit for a fly-by that dipped teasingly close to the Moon’s pockmarked surface.
And, suddenly, it was almost time. Just two weeks before the scheduled July liftoff of Apollo 11 for the first landing mission, von Braun somehow slipped away with Maria for a vacation trip to Greece. He visited the ancient Temple of Apollo on the island of Delos, birthplace of the god. “Since our space project is named Apollo,” he explained to Greek reporters, “I thought it only proper that I come to Greece and pay my respects to the god Apollo before we finally made this big Moon-landing attempt.” As friend and coworker Ruth von Saurma wrote him a few years afterward: “And who but you would squeeze into the weeks of check-out procedures at Kennedy Space Center preceding the first manned lunar landing a quick trip to the Greek isles and return full of enthusiasm and new impressions!”15
In Washington, NASA Administrator Thomas O. “Tom” Paine, who had succeeded Jim Webb in early 1969, was asked what he thought of von Braun’s leaving the country at such a crucial time. “Well,” Paine told reporters, “Wernher is beseeching the Greek gods, and we just sent astronaut Frank Borman to see the Pope—so I guess we have all bets covered for Apollo 11.”
Returning to the Marshall Center, von Braun gave assembled employees a trip report plus a history lesson on ancient Greece. He threw in a memorable mini-lecture on Prince Henry the Navigator, recalled Marshall’s Jay Foster. He drew parallels between the Portuguese mariner’s African voyages, their unforeseen impact on European maritime exploration, the resultant expansion of sixteenth-century Europe’s holdings, and the approaching Apollo flights of lunar exploration, discovery, and adventure. Foster found the talk a typical example of von Braun’s intellectual breadth and penchant for synthesizing.16
At a news conference in Huntsville just one week before Apollo 11’s appointment with history, von Braun struck a balance between confidence and nervousness. He predicted success in man’s first attempt to set foot on the Moon and stressed that extreme caution remained the norm: “This is no wild-blue-yonder project—no come-hell-or-high-water attitude.” But he also admitted at a July 10 press conference to anxious pangs “just like you and all of us have. Keep in mind we are pioneering . . . and the element of chance is always present. There are pitfalls, and we have to take chances to get from here to there.” He added, “The public should not be complacent. Something may happen and the public should be prepared for the shock.”17
(Similarly, a couple of years earlier, Jim Webb, then the boss at NASA, had pointed out the great dangers when he testified to Congress after the Apollo 1 fatal fire. He had likened a fueled and loaded Saturn V to “an atomic bomb” out there on the pad.)
At the press conference, von Braun also noted that NASA had helped the odds for success by choosing a landing site—the Sea of Tranquility—that was easiest for the astronauts, if not the most promising for scientific discovery. “The maria [seas, or dark spots] on the Moon are about as much value to science as a gravel pit,” he acknowledged.18
As the Apollo 11 liftoff neared, the space scientist expressed two regrets. One, the demands of his administrative workload had removed him increasingly from the hands-on engineering pursuits he had so enjoyed during his German and postwar years. Two, it saddened him that he must remain earthbound when the Saturn V roared away on July 16.
“I would love to go to the Moon first,” he told inquiring reporters, “but we must be realistic. As this gray hair will show you, I’m fifty-seven years old. And astronauts must be trained test pilots who can react to emergencies with precision, speed, and accuracy. But if things go right, within ten years from now I could very well be going to the Moon as a passenger—an opportunity many ordinary people in many walks of life can also experience.”19
The scientist also said he doubted man’s propensity for warfare would spread to the heavens. That’s mainly because “we have enough capability to destroy ourselves right here on Earth, without taking it into space.” Emphasizing NASA’s “peaceful” role, he said he was thankful for that, adding, “I’m happy to be out of weaponry.”20
With a week to go, von Braun acknowledged to reporters that the Russians would not beat America to the Moon. The United States was on the verge of winning the race, he said, “because we decided to do it.” He did not address the disastrous problems the Soviets, who also had decided to do it, had suffered in their Saturn-class rocket development program.21 He said only that they remained ahead of America in certain other areas of space exploration, such as successful soft landings on Venus.
In a heavy touch of irony, the USSR launched its Luna 15 probe to the Moon on July 13 in an effort to steal some of Apollo 11’s thunder. The unmanned probe’s mission was to land a lunar rover, collect soil samples, and return to Earth. Luna 15 reached lunar orbit just two days before Apollo 11’s scheduled arrival, but the Soviet ploy failed. The probe circled the Moon fifty-two times. Then, instead of making a soft landing, it crashed into the lunar surface on July 21.22
As for the cost to U.S. taxpayers for the anticipated victory on the Moon, von Braun asserted to reporters: “I am absolutely convinced that the $23 billion spent on the manned space program has not made the United States $23 billion poorer but many billions richer in new knowledge acquired.” Not only had the nation seen dramatic advances across the board in science and technology, he added, but the space program was acting as the “cutting edge for progress in many other areas,” from industrial management to quality control.23 Von Braun himself, commanding NASA’s largest center, with the biggest hunk of the agency’s multibillion-dollar budgetary pie, did not add much to Project Apollo’s total tab. His yearly pay then was less than $35,000.
At T-minus two days, von Braun was one of five NASA officials holding a packed news conference at the Kennedy Space Center. As a member of the press corps on hand, I saw two revealing incidents. First, the rocketeer drew the most admiring reaction from the press corps with his unequivocal response to the question of how he would rank the impending Apollo 11 lunar landing with other historic events. “About with the importance of aquatic life first crawling on land.” Then, at the end of the briefing, the reporters swarmed around von Braun. The other space agency leaders were allowed to leave the hall virtually unmolested, while eager questioners surrounded the always-quotable von Braun.
The tradition of “little get-togethers”—big, lively parties hosted by aerospace and news media companies, as well as smaller affairs—all over the Cape Kennedy area the night before major launches was in full bloom on the eve of Apollo 11’s scheduled takeoff. For these prelaunch soirees von Braun was known to helicopter from party to party with a few associates in tow. All the big Saturn-Apollo contractors threw parties before each launch, and all wanted von Braun to attend theirs. A chopper was the only practical way he could make the rounds.
On the night of July 15, 1969, the hottest ticket was to a party hosted by Time-Life at a country club in Titusville. The place was jammed with entertainment stars and other celebrities—Jimmy Stewart, Charles Lindbergh, Norman Mailer, among others—as well as U.S. and foreign government officials, industry big hats, and key NASA leaders. At one point in the festivities von Braun took the stage to join aviation pioneer Lindbergh and his earliest mentor in rocketry, Professor Hermann Oberth, who at age seventy-four had been flown to Florida from Europe for the epochal flight. The Marshall Center chief also invited the program director of the all-important Saturn V, Col. Lee James, U.S. Army (Ret.), onstage for special recognition. Von Braun, with Maria looking on, spoke to the crowd and took questions. He gave his confident promise for the next morning’s event: “Of course it will be a success!”24
July 16 dawned bright and blue skied on Florida’s east coast. Lee James had left the big prelaunch bash about 11:00 PM, dropped off his wife, Kathleen, at their motel, and headed straight for the countdown in progress at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Control Center. He got no sleep that night. Von Braun fared little better. He went from the party to his Cocoa Beach motel room to turn in—but instead spent an hour reviewing the launch plans. He telephoned his old Peenemünde comrade, KSC Director Kurt Debus, to wish him luck and to double-check several details. At last he crawled into bed and said a prayer. He did not sleep well. He arose before dawn, showered, shaved, and dressed in a suit and tie for the day’s business.25
An estimated one million spectators were taking up positions at viewing sites a few miles from the launch pad. Hundreds of invited VIPs, the list topped by former President Lyndon Johnson and Ladybird Johnson, began to assemble at the bleachers provided. A horde of three thousand news media representatives, the most ever accredited for a space shot, gathered at the press site in the darkness before sunrise. Three miles away, the Saturn V–Apollo 11 stack, nearly as tall as a forty-story skyscraper, stood glowing a bright white under brilliant spotlight beams in a scene reminiscent of an old-fashioned Hollywood film premiere.
Von Braun arrived at 4:00 AM at Launch Control, where a team of more than fifty were working in the main room. He checked in with Debus and learned the count was going well. He took his assigned place, put on his headset, adjusted the earphones, and tuned in.26
Later that morning, after the sun had risen, von Braun left Launch Control for the press site to do live prelaunch interviews inside the network television trailers. Afterward, he was walking alone in the sunlit press area when he encountered a familiar newspaper writer-editor from Huntsville. I stuck out my hand and said the only thing there seemed left to say, “Good luck, Doctor.” We shook hands, and I was reminded how large his hands were. He smiled and said, “Thank you.” He then turned and headed with his thoughts back to Launch Control.
Von Braun took his seat again in the main control room as the countdown advanced. The hour he had worked toward for so long was at hand. What were his final thoughts as the Apollo 11 mission’s first moment of truth neared, a reporter had later asked. “I quietly said the Lord’s Prayer,” he replied.27 His emphasis was on the passage “Thy will be done.”28
Ignition of the S-1C booster stage’s ground-shaking power plant came at 9:32 AM. For nearly nine interminable seconds the von Braun team’s Saturn V went nowhere, remaining clamped to the pad while the five engines built up to full mega-thrust. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel were consumed in an inferno before the leviathan at last lumbered upward with agonizing slowness and pounding thunder that was felt as sound waves slapping reporters’ chests back at the press site. The rocket gradually gained speed and, dropping spent stages along the way, headed for a parking orbit around Earth. From there, its third stage would propel the spacecraft carrying former naval flier Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, whose Ph.D. was in astrophysics, and gifted writer/handball champ Michael Collins to the Moon, three days and about a quarter-million miles away.
Minutes after the launch, I spied von Braun’s mentor Hermann Oberth walking (evidently unrecognized by others at the press site) under the escort of MSFC chief scientist Ernst Stuhlinger. I rushed across the grass to intercept the pair for a brief interview, with Stuhlinger serving as translator. “It was marvelous,” Oberth said of the Saturn–Apollo 11 takeoff. “When I began thinking of this flight I was a boy of eleven. It was just as I imagined—only more marvelous.” He speculated that the first manned mission to Mars might come “in 1982 at the earliest, or if we go first-class [taking time for a non-crash-program], about 1986.”
Just as the Pilgrims did not envision the nation that would evolve when the Mayflower landed on American shores, neither von Braun nor anyone else could accurately predict “what will eventually spring from the bosom of Apollo 11,” the elated scientist commented after the launch and before the lunar landing. “But I do hope that history will record that we were aware ... of the enormous implications of the lunar journey, that . . . we are reaching out in the name of peace, and that, while we take pride in this American achievement, we share it in genuine brotherhood with all nations and with all people.”29
Later during that launch day, the von Brauns and their nine-year-old son, Peter, enjoyed a relaxing private dinner in the area. Their companions were an old friend, Capt. Bill Fortune, U.S. Navy (Ret.), his wife, and another couple of American-born friends, Austin and Margaret Stanton.
Before the meal, Peenemünde veteran Gerhard Heller and his wife came by to join in a round of celebratory drinks. Peter von Braun was pole fishing in the waters behind the dinner site. Soon the boy excitedly brought in his catch. His proud father praised him and showed him how to clean the fish. “We were not only greatly honored” to have the von Brauns as dinner guests on that epochal day, Fortune later wrote, “but had a most happy time, with Peter providing the fish course.”30
Two days later von Braun headed for Houston aboard his NASA Gulfstream with a coterie of Marshall Center team members in order to be at Mission Control for Apollo 11’s final approach to the Moon and the landing attempt. He invited George Fehler and Ed Grubbs, who were among his regular contract pilots out of Huntsville, to join him in the control center as soon as they had the plane serviced and secured at the airport.
“What a treat to be at Mission Control for that [lunar] landing!” Fehler recalled. “But when we finally got there, we didn’t have a badge or anything to get in. They didn’t recognize us and weren’t going to let us in.... About that time Dr. von Braun walked nearby and saw us there. He said, ‘Get them a badge.’ They got us a badge.”31
Von Braun had been in his seat in Mission Control for several hours on Saturday afternoon, July 19, when the Apollo 11 spacecraft reached lunar orbit. He was also there the next afternoon when Armstrong and Aldrin separated their lunar landing craft from the orbiting mothership carrying Collins and headed down toward the gray, grim surface. He was there for the white-knuckle, running-on-empty touchdown by cool customer Armstrong. And, he was there for Armstrong’s welcome words: “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
Some hours later von Braun was back in his seat watching a man preparing to become the first man to walk on the Moon. “When that leg appeared on television as Armstrong was about to get down to the lunar surface,” the rocket scientist acknowledged afterward, it was “a pretty emotional moment.”32 Armstrong then took the plunge, saying, “That’s one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind.” An estimated five hundred million people around the world saw it live on television, and an even larger number heard it on radio. To reporters, von Braun said it was “a quantum leap” for science and technology, and a long-burning dream realized for a naturalized American citizen.
NASA Administrator Tom Paine described the Apollo 11 drama to the press as “a magnificent triumph—and the entire world was applauding.” Arthur C. Clarke told a reporter: “I haven’t cried or prayed for twenty years, but I did both today. It was the perfect last day for the Old World.” The next day Lord Duncan Sandys—now a member of Britain’s Parliament—wired his old enemy von Braun: “Warmest congratulations on your great contribution to this historic achievement. I am thankful that your illustrious career was not cut short in the bombing raid at Peenemünde 26 years ago.”33
Navy veteran Richard M. Nixon, in his first year as president, made a point of joining the returned Apollo 11 crew aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet after their splashdown and safe recovery from the Pacific. The excited chief executive gushed, “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation!”
Not surprisingly, von Braun, too, had several further comments on the subject. “What do we have now that Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin have stepped on the Moon’s surface? A new element of thinking is sweeping across the face of this good earth. For the first time in history, life has left its planetary cradle, and the ultimate destiny of man is no longer confined to the Earth.”34
After von Braun returned home to Rocket City, the community staged a celebration and conquering hero’s welcome for him on the Courthouse Square. Four members of the city council carried him on their shoulders to the rostrum. “To be borne by a rocket to the Moon is impressive,” an overjoyed von Braun told the ecstatic crowd that day, “but to be borne up these steps by admirers is almost as impressive!” As the cheering continued, the space leader emphasized what the team had accomplished. “The space flights must continue,” he exhorted. “The ultimate destiny of man is no longer confined to Earth.” He referred to the remaining lunar-landing missions and wistfully added, “Maybe one of these days we’ll even have a man on Mars.”35
An immediate post–Apollo 11 visitor to his office was Associated Press correspondent Howard Benedict, who had been a rookie space reporter at Cape Canaveral in 1958 and 1959, when von Braun began tutoring him on the fundamentals of rocketry and space exploration. In the 1960s, after von Braun joined NASA, Benedict often traveled to Huntsville to interview him and to follow, and write about, the development of the Saturn V rocket. And then, shortly after the Moon landing, the ace space chronicler remembered, “I walked into von Braun’s office for an interview. His first words: ‘I told you we could, and we did it.’”36
Fully one-half of the more than one hundred German rocket engineers and scientists who had accompanied von Braun to America in 1945–46 were still with the team when Saturn-Apollo 11 rocketed into history. In mid-August 1969, the von Brauns and key members of his Marshall group were among the guests of honor at a star-studded state dinner hosted in Los Angeles by President and Mrs. Nixon to celebrate the lunar-landing triumph. Whole galaxies of film actors and other celebrities37 attended the formal affair, Huntsville’s Lee and Kathleen James vividly remembered.38
The Apollo 11 flight crew, now national heroes, presented von Braun that fall with a leather-bound copy of their book, First on the Moon. It bore an inscription signed by the three: “To Wernher, who postulated, predicted, advertised, conned, pulled and finally pushed to make us first on the Moon.”39 Later, after several more successful missions to the Moon, von Braun expressed his awe over the exploits of the Apollo flight crews: “Those men took craft they had never flown before. They went where men have never been before, and came back. And they did it time after time, time after time.”40
Fate or luck or divine blessing had been with them, and with von Braun. He could look objectively, with admiration and even a sense of wonder, at what his Marshall Center rocket team and its network of contractors in industry had accomplished in Project Apollo. “Sometimes I marvel and sometimes I shudder at the things we did in building Saturn V, and at our naïveté,” he confessed, adding:
Our biggest problem was always the totality of the problem—getting all the parts working together. There were other difficulties, too—controlling violent combustion in the rocket engines, serious reliability problems with new computers, an inordinate amount of manufacturing difficulties, particularly as concerns the structure of the fuel tanks, and the fact that welding is more an art than a science. . . . A mountain of things went wrong, but this is precisely what we expected. At no time have I had any doubt that it would be completely successful.41
Some observers rated the scope of the development of the Saturn V alone on a par with the atomic-bomb-creating Manhattan Project during World War II. In its entirety Saturn-Apollo later was widely ranked as humankind’s largest engineering effort of all time. Jim Webb lauded Marshall’s management scheme as a model for large government-industry enterprises everywhere.42
Despite the technological mountains that had to be climbed, Apollo 11 and its successor missions had become, as the Associated Press later wrote, “a promise kept.” It is for meeting the enormous engineering challenge of Saturn V that von Braun and “the Peenemünde boys” will be the most remembered of all the Apollo participants five hundred years from now, Walter Cronkite predicted in 1999.43 Furthermore, he said, history will regard von Braun as “the New Columbus,” as Cronkite himself already did. Columbus’s voyages of exploration and discovery stood out in 1999 as the greatest events of five hundred years ago. “Five centuries from now, I believe that the one date that will be remembered from our century is 1969—the year that the human race first journeyed from the Earth to the stars.”44
In an interview with me in 1999, Cronkite envisioned that “as people later look back for those heroes that made [the Moon landings] possible, they will fixate undoubtedly on the astronauts who did it—Armstrong and the rest. But they will also look at the engineers. They will recognize it as an engineering feat. And when they do, they will fix on von Braun as certainly one of the greatest space engineering pioneers.”45
Could America have made it to the Moon without the German-born rocket man and his team? The consensus at the time was: Not as soon, but eventually, yes. Onetime Project Apollo director Sam Phillips, after years of reflection, changed his view. He said, in essence: No, developing the impossibly daunting Saturn V probably took the unique experience and skills and ingenuity of von Braun and his team.46
Von Braun’s own answer to the question usually boiled down to this: Man was destined to reach the Moon, with or without my help. He tended to credit the rocket pioneers of the past as well as his enlarged team with its German-born nucleus. He often deflected personal plaudits by saying, “Space exploration is not a one-man show.”