This Is Rocket Science: True Stories of the Risk-taking Scientists who Figure Out Ways to Explore Beyond

WERNHER VON BRAUN

In 1936 von Braun became technical director of Germany’s military rocket program. Soon, he and his team launched two liquid-fuel rockets that went a mile and a half high. Shortly after that, the Soviets, who’d also been working with liquid propulsion, fired a rocket that soared more than eight miles into the sky. And a month later, one of Robert Goddard’s rockets flew faster than the speed of sound. Von Braun and his team read about this in journals and used some of Goddard’s ideas in their own designs.

During World War II German military commanders, under the rule of Adolf Hitler, wanted to use rockets as deadly weapons of war—military missiles that could deliver explosive warheads onto enemy territory.

As has been true with all other rockets since the first fire arrows, no one person can be credited with the entire design of the German rocket. Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and others had envisioned elements of this kind of rocket. Goddard had already launched his own version of a liquid-fuel rocket. Von Braun and his fellow rocket scientists worked at developing theirs at a facility named Peenemunde. As the war went on, it was hard for von Braun and his crew to find petroleum products, but German farms were producing bumper crops of potatoes. Potatoes can be distilled into ethyl alcohol. By combining ethyl alcohol with liquid oxygen, the German “Rocket Team” had what they needed. By 1944 they’d nearly perfected the deadly Vengeance Weapon 2 rocket, shortened to V-2. It had a 200-mile range and carried a 2-ton warhead.

THE V-2 ROCKET WAS BUILT AND TESTED AT A GERMAN FACILITY CALLED PEENEMUNDE.

In his 2007 book Red Moon Rising, journalist Matthew Brzezinski describes in detail the launch of a V-2 from the German-occupied Dutch coast. He writes, “Twenty-five seconds had elapsed since liftoff. During that period, the rocket had shed six thousand pounds.” That’s 6,000 pounds of liquid propellant burned off and converted into thrust. “At an altitude of seventeen miles, the turbine shut down, cutting off fuel to the combustion chamber. Now the rocket was a projectile, a forty-six-foot-long artillery shell…moving at 3,500 miles per hour.”

That V-2 rocket reached an altitude of 52 miles before gravity curved it downward to eventually land with a tremendous explosion in London. By the end of the war, of the almost 6,000 V-2 rockets the Germans had built, 3,500 had been launched—40 percent of them aimed at England. The damage was ruinous.

When the war neared its final days, the United States and the Soviet Union both wanted the designs for the V-2 rockets as well as the engineers who’d built them. Entering Germany with their invading armies, Soviet and American intelligence teams began searching through German installations for any V-2 parts and engineers they could find. The Soviet team included Sergei Korolev.

As a teenager Korolev had spent hours watching seaplanes and gliders at a naval airstrip near his home in Odessa, a major port in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. The pilots grew so used to young Korolev hanging around that they let him work on the planes and even took him for flights. At 17 Korolev joined an amateur aircraft club and later entered college to study aeronautical engineering. After graduation he joined GIRD, a Soviet research group working on rocket propulsion.

Then came horrible times for Korolev. In 1938, in a political purge ordered by the leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, Korolev was accused of “subversion in a new field of technology” and was sent to concentration camps in Siberia, where he nearly died from beatings and starvation. Later, the Soviets realized the value of his expertise and transferred him to a prison where he could continue his rocket research. In 1944, after he’d gathered V-2 information in Germany, he returned to Moscow and began to design military missiles based on the German rockets. But he was more interested in developing rockets for space travel than for warfare. About one of his designs he said angrily, “The purpose of this rocket is to get there! [He pointed to the sky.] This is not some military toy!”