He focused on gyroscopes, propellant, and lift. In time, maybe they could even reach Chicago.Īfter the war, when fame tapped him on the shoulder and he became the smiling face of America’s fledgling space program, von Braun made sure to downplay his involvement in the darker aspects of this effort. The goal was to launch them like locusts towards New York and Washington, D.C. Within days, an order was given for thousands of V-2s to be built. Clapping his hands together, he made the young SS officer a professor on the spot. He wanted to know what the “annihilating effect” of the warhead might be, and apologized that he hadn’t believed in the project sooner. He watched as, in brilliant color, a rocket shot into the sky on a mute flame, then arced away at three times the speed of sound. As the film splashed life against a concrete reinforced wall, Hitler sat slumped in a wooden chair, a black cape draped over his shoulders. On a July evening in 1943, von Braun dimmed the lights in an underground bunker and showed the Führer a silent movie of a V-2 taking off. He wanted to punish the Allies by turning their pretty little cities into smoldering wastelands. But as Germany began to lose the war, he slowly warmed to the idea. He saw it as simply a massive artillery shell with an extremely long range. Although von Braun accepted this commission, he would spend the rest of his life bending attention away from his involvement with the same organization that ran Dachau, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.Īt first, Hitler was totally unimpressed with the V-2. Von Braun joined the Nazi party in 1937, and three years later, Heinrich Himmler personally invited him to join the SS. He was the center of gravity for the V-2 program at Peenemünde: all major decisions orbited around him, and he made sure his rockets hit their intended targets. Though only in his twenties, von Braun knew how to organize, how to charm, and-most importantly-how to turn blueprints into realities. ![]() Quick with a smile, he made parties sparkle with laughter and was known as something of a ladies’ man. The V-2 was the brainchild of a young man named Wernher von Braun. The V stood for Vergeltungswaffe, or “vengeance weapon.” For its victims, it blew open the door to the next world. A button was pushed, fuel ignited in blinding fury, and off it went into the clouds. This Nazi rocket was essentially just an enormous projectile that didn’t require a cannon. The V-2 was never designed to stay up in the heavens. They only cared about height, so that the V-2 could arc over the top of a deadly parabola and then scream its way back down toward earth, where it would punch holes into cities hundreds of miles away. But the Nazis weren’t interested in setting altitude records. ![]() During one particular test in the summer of 1944, launching from an island on the Baltic Coast called Greifswalder Oie, their rocket soared past the “Kármán Line”-which, in marking the boundary between our world and the black void beyond, puts the beginning of space at 100 kilometers above sea level, or roughly sixty-two miles straight up-by almost fifty miles. The world’s first functional long-range ballistic rocket, the V-2, weighed almost 28,000 pounds and could rumble fifty miles up into the crisp unexplored atmosphere. It was so technologically advanced that Nazi Germany became the first country to put an object made by human hands into space. It will open to him the gates of heaven.” “The rocket will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.
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