Beyond: Our Future in Space (5 page)

The first to launch a liquid-fuel rocket was American Robert Goddard. As a boy, Goddard was thin, frail, and subject to pleurisy, bronchitis, and stomach problems. He spent much of his time holed up in the local public library, where he was transported by the science fiction of H. G. Wells. Goddard fixed his inspiration to a day when he was seventeen and he climbed a cherry tree to remove dead limbs: “I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the
possibility
of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet. . . . I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended.”
¹⁵

In 1914, Goddard registered the patents for a liquid-fuel rocket and a multistage rocket, the first of his more than two hundred patents. He was a hands-on experimenter as well as an expert physicist. Liquid-fuel rockets are finicky because the volatile fuel and oxidizer must be injected into a combustion chamber at a carefully controlled rate. On a bitterly cold spring morning in 1926, Goddard achieved success with a small liquid-propellant rocket dubbed “Nell.” Launched from his Aunt Effie’s farm, it traveled for 184 feet in a flight that lasted less than three seconds, landing in a cabbage field (
Figure 6
). Over the years, he conducted more than three dozen test flights, refining his designs and techniques until he reached altitudes of several miles. In 1929, he began what became a lifelong friendship with Charles Lindbergh, who shared his vision.
¹⁶

Nevertheless, the world was not quite ready for rockets. Goddard’s seminal paper from 1919, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” was ridiculed by the press and fellow scientists. An unsigned editorial in the
New York Times
was particularly harsh, accusing him of ignorance of the laws of physics: “. . . Professor Goddard . . . does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. . . . Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
¹⁷
Forty-nine years after ripping Goddard, and a day after the launch of Apollo 11, the paper issued a brief correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”
¹⁸
The apology was too late for Goddard, who died of throat cancer in 1945.

Wernher von Braun

Warfare and space exploration merged again in the 1940s. Goddard had financed his research with small grants from the Smithsonian Institution and the Guggenheim Foundation; no government agency showed interest and the military was particularly dismissive. But America’s future adversaries were very interested in Goddard’s rocketry. During the 1930s, a German military attaché working in the United States sent a report on Goddard’s work back to the military intelligence agency, and the Soviets gleaned information from a KGB spy embedded in the US Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. Toward the end of World War II, Goddard got to inspect a captured German V-2 ballistic missile. The V-2 was far more advanced than any of Goddard’s rockets, but he was convinced the Germans had “stolen” his ideas. In particular, Goddard was furious at Oberth, whom he accused of plagiarizing his 1919 work; this episode contributed to Goddard’s secrecy and paranoia.
¹⁹

The architect of the V-2 was the most controversial figure in the history of rocketry: Wernher von Braun.

We can picture the young German boy as he became hooked on rockets. Inspired by Germans who were setting land speed records in rocket-propelled cars, the twelve-year-old caused major disruption in a crowded street. Echoing Wan Hu, he attached to a toy wagon a dozen of the largest skyrockets he could find. Rather than riding the wagon as Wan Hu had ridden his sedan chair, von Braun lit the fuses and stood back. He was thrilled with the results: “It performed beyond my wildest dreams. The wagon careened crazily about, trailing a tail of fire like a comet. When the rockets burned out, ending their sparkling performance with a magnificent thunderclap, the wagon rolled majestically to a halt.”
²⁰
The police who arrived on the scene were less impressed; they took the young boy into custody.

Wernher von Braun was rescued from that indiscretion by his father, who was the German minister of agriculture. His mother could trace her ancestry back to the kings of France, England, and Denmark, and the young von Braun inherited the title of baron. All through his life, he exhibited a self-confidence bordering on arrogance.

Though he was a gifted musician who played piano and cello and composed in the style of Hindemith, von Braun initially struggled with math and physics. His mother bought him a telescope, allowing him to be captivated by the Moon. As a young teenager, he bought
By Rocket into Interplanetary Space
by Hermann Oberth but was dismayed when he opened it. He recalled, “To my consternation, I couldn’t understand a word. Its pages were a baffling conglomeration of mathematical symbols and formulas.”
²¹
He realized that the success of space travel was underpinned by technical calculations, so he decided to master the relevant subjects. At the age of eighteen, he began his long tutelage with Oberth; that same year, he attended a talk by a pioneer of high-altitude ballooning, telling him, “You know, I plan on traveling to the Moon at some time.”

When Adolf Hitler came to power, Wernher von Braun was twenty-one. He later claimed that he had been apolitical and disinterested in the world around him. But his uncritical patriotism meant that, at best, he was surprisingly naïve about the ramifications of his work and, at worst, he was complicit in death and destruction.
²²

With the joy of an amateur, von Braun continued to experiment with rockets. His days in Berlin were busy with study toward a graduate degree in physics, but he spent every spare moment at a derelict, 300-acre site of scrub and weeds at the edge of the city. There, members of the Berlin Rocket Society carried out their work using scrounged materials and donated labor. When the Army Ordnance Department took interest and started to fund their research, von Braun was delighted. (It was in fact exactly the type of military support that Goddard had sought and failed to get for his own work.) When von Braun finished his thesis in 1934, parts of it were considered so crucial to national security that they stayed classified until 1960. He set aside his dreams of space travel and moved to a big facility that the Army built for him on an island in the Baltic Sea. There he worked on a weapon the Nazi Propaganda Ministry would eventually call the Vengeance Weapon 2, or the V-2 (
Figure 7
).

Even if science, not politics, motivated von Braun, he was part of the machinery of war. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS, and photos exist of him donning those uniforms and posing in the company of senior Nazi Party members. After seeing film footage of the successful launch of a V-2 prototype, Hitler personally made von Braun a professor—an exceptional honor for a thirty-one-year-old engineer.

The V-2 was inaccurate but effective as a “terror” weapon, a projectile screaming out of the sky at four times the speed of sound, impossible to defend against. The rockets killed an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel in London and Antwerp during Nazi airstrikes. Each rocket was made in an underground factory at Mittelwerk, where prisoners from the nearby Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp toiled in deplorable conditions. About 12,000 forced laborers and prisoners died producing the weapons.

But von Braun’s insider status didn’t place him above the Nazi Party’s suspicion. At an event in early 1944, after drinking too much, he said he thought the war would end badly for the Germans and that all he’d ever wanted to do with his rockets was send them into space. Such talk was tantamount to treason. He was a pilot, so the Gestapo arrested him to keep him from defecting to the West. A month later, Albert Speer convinced Hitler to release von Braun because he was critical to the V-2 program.

In early 1945, as Allied forces moved deep into Germany, the SS moved von Braun and his team to the Bavarian Alps, with orders to execute them rather than let them fall into enemy hands. But von Braun argued for the team to be dispersed so as not to be an easy target for American bombers. He had heard stories of the harsh treatment meted out by the Soviets to their captured enemies, so he deliberately surrendered to the Americans rather than the approaching Soviet forces. On May 2, he was able to slip away and surrender to a private from the 44th Infantry Division. He was at the top of the blacklist of German scientists and engineers targeted for interrogation by US military experts.
²³

When the fog of war lifted, von Braun had been rehabilitated. The American intelligence agencies created a false employment history for him, expunged his Nazi Party membership from the public record, and gave him a security clearance. Although he should have been relieved to get through the war unscathed, von Braun chafed at the restrictions of his new life. Working at Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, he couldn’t leave the base without a military escort. Whereas in Germany he had had thousands of engineers reporting to him when he was only twenty-six, in the United States he had a small team and was starved of resources. At least his loyal German engineers continued to address him as Herr Professor.

Although the postwar years were frustrating for von Braun, he gained a new start and had been “cleansed” of his Nazism. He was free to pursue his dreams of space.

The Big Chill

Germany lost the war due to a “marriage of convenience” between the Soviet Union and the Western allies. But those countries’ ideological differences bubbled up in the aftermath of the war, setting the stage for the
Cold War
, a term coined by writer George Orwell in October 1945.

As the war ended, Wernher von Braun and a hundred senior German scientists were working under US Army command with orders to continue development of the V-2 rocket.

Meanwhile, the Soviets took over jurisdiction of the Mittelwerk factory but found that most of the best engineers had already defected to the Americans. Whereas in the United States the Germans were at the core of rocket development, the Germans who worked in the Soviet Union were used only as consultants and were repatriated in the early 1950s. The Soviet counterpart to von Braun was the equally brilliant Sergei Korolev. He started by reverse engineering the V-2 but quickly developed his own designs, leading to a 100-ton engine of unprecedented power. As a result of one of Stalin’s purges, Korolev spent six years in prison, where mistreatment led to serious health problems throughout his life. The Soviets referred to him only as the “Chief Designer” during the Cold War and his identity wasn’t revealed in the West until after his death in 1966.

Mistrust between the United States and the Soviet Union deepened after the war. The United States lost its monopoly on the atomic bomb and watched helplessly as the Soviets annexed European countries to form an “iron curtain” that stretched from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The Soviets had suffered 27 million casualties in the war and they feared invasion, especially as the United States had a far superior air force with bases near Soviet territory. The role of ideology in the so-called Space Race has been summarized by journalist and historian William Burrows: “The cold war would become the great engine—the supreme catalyst—that sent rockets and their cargoes far above Earth and worlds away. If Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, Goddard, and others were the fathers of rocketry, then the competition between capitalism and communism was its midwife.”
²⁴