Talk:Wernher von Braun

Confusing wording in section
In the section "Membership in the Allgemeine SS", there are a few strangely worded sentences. "but in 2002 a former SS officer at Peenemünde told the BBC that von Braun had regularly worn the SS uniform to official meetings. He began as an Untersturmführer (Second lieutenant) and was promoted three times by Himmler, the last time in June 1943 to SS-Sturmbannführer (Major). Von Braun later claimed that these were simply technical promotions received each year regularly by mail."

I interpret these sentences as saying that a former SS officer told the BBC something in 2002, to which Von Braun responded afterwards. However, this is impossible, considering that he died in 1977.

Uncited material in need of citations
I am moving the following uncited material here until it can be properly supported with inline citations of reliable, secondary sources, per WP:V, WP:CS, WP:IRS, WP:PSTS, WP:BLP, WP:NOR, et al. This diff shows where it was in the article. Nightscream (talk) 19:42, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Early life
He was the second of three sons of a noble Lutheran family. From birth he held the title of Freiherr (equivalent to Baron). The German nobility's legal privileges were abolished in 1919, although noble titles could still be used as part of the family name.

He could play piano pieces of Beethoven and Bach from memory. Beginning in 1925, Wernher attended a boarding school at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar, where he did not do well in physics and mathematics. There he acquired a copy of Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1923, By Rocket into Planetary Space) by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. In 1928, his parents moved him to the Hermann-Lietz-Internat (also a residential school) on the East Frisian North Sea island of Spiekeroog. Space travel had always fascinated Wernher, and from then on he applied himself to physics and mathematics to pursue his interest in rocket engineering.

...and causing a major disruption in a crowded street by detonating the toy wagon to which he had attached fireworks. He was taken into custody by the local police until his father came to get him. The Great Depression put an end to the Opel RAK program and Fritz von Opel left Germany in 1930, emigrating first to the US, later to France and Switzerland. After the break-up of Opel-RAK program, Valier eventually was killed while experimenting with liquid-fueled rockets as means of propulsion in mid-1930, and is considered the first fatality of the dawning space age.

Although he worked mainly on military rockets in his later years there, space travel remained his primary interest.

Membership in the Allgemeine-SS
Von Braun joined the SS horseback riding school on 1 November 1933 as an SS-Anwärter. He left the following year....and was given the rank of Untersturmführer in the Allgemeine-SS and issued membership number 185,068. In 1947, he gave the U.S. War Department this explanation:

"In spring 1940, one SS-Standartenführer (SS-Colonel) Müller from Greifswald, a bigger town in the vicinity of Peenemünde, looked me up in my office ... and told me that Reichsführer-SS Himmler had sent him with the order to urge me to join the SS. I told him I was so busy with my rocket work that I had no time to spare for any political activity. He then told me, that ... the SS would cost me no time at all. I would be awarded the rank of a[n] "Untersturmfuehrer" (lieutenant) and it were [sic] a very definite desire of Himmler that I attend his invitation to join.

I asked Müller to give me some time for reflection. He agreed.

Realizing that the matter was of highly political significance for the relation between the SS and the Army, I called immediately on my military superior, Dr. Dornberger. He informed me that the SS had for a long time been trying to get their "finger in the pie" of the rocket work. I asked him what to do. He replied on the spot that if I wanted to continue our mutual work, I had no alternative but to join."

Work under Nazi regime
In 1933, von Braun was working on his creative doctorate when the Nazi Party came to power in a coalition government in Germany; rocketry was almost immediately moved onto the national agenda. An artillery captain, Walter Dornberger, arranged an Ordnance Department research grant for von Braun, who then worked next to Dornberger's existing solid-fuel rocket test site at Kummersdorf.

By the end of 1934, his group had successfully launched two liquid fuel rockets that rose to heights of 2.2 and 3.5 km (2 mi).

There were no German rocket societies after the collapse of the VfR, and civilian rocket tests were forbidden by the new Nazi regime. Only military development was allowed, and to this end, a larger facility was erected at the village of Peenemünde in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. Dornberger became the military commander at Peenemünde, with von Braun as technical director. In collaboration with the Luftwaffe, the Peenemünde group developed liquid-fuel rocket engines for aircraft and jet-assisted takeoffs. They also developed the long-range A-4 ballistic missile and the supersonic Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile.

In Germany at this time, this was an exceptional promotion for an engineer who was only 31 years old.

That line appears in the film I Aim at the Stars, a 1960 biographical film of von Braun.

Arrest and release by the Nazi regime
He therefore recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V-2. Von Braun claimed to have replied that the problems were merely technical and he was confident that they would be solved with Dornberger's assistance.

...where he was held for two weeks without knowing the charges against him.

Surrender to the Americans
On 29 April 1945, Oberammergau was captured by the Allied forces who seized the majority of the engineering team.

The Red Army eventually took over Thuringia as part of the Soviet occupation zone after 1 July 1945, as agreed by the Yalta Conference.

Initially, he was recruited to the U.S. under a program called Operation Overcast, subsequently known as Operation Paperclip. There is evidence, however, that British intelligence and scientists were the first to interview him in depth, eager to gain information that they knew U.S. officials would deny them. The team included the young L.S. Snell, then the leading British rocket engineer, later chief designer of Rolls-Royce Limited and inventor of the Concorde's engines. The specific information the British gleaned remained top secret, both from the Americans and from the other allies.

U.S. Army career
The Jupiter-C successfully launched the West's first satellite, Explorer 1, on 31 January 1958. This event signaled the birth of America's space program.

Despite the work on the Redstone rocket, the 12 years from 1945 to 1957 were probably some of the most frustrating for von Braun and his colleagues. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev and his team of scientists and engineers plowed ahead with several new rocket designs and the Sputnik program, while the American government was not very interested in von Braun's work or views and embarked only on a very modest rocket-building program. In the meantime, the press called attention to von Braun's past as a member of the SS and the slave labor used to build his V-2 rockets.

Popular concepts for a human presence in space
Repeating the pattern he had established during his earlier career in Germany, von Braun – while directing military rocket development in the real world – continued to entertain his engineer-scientist's dream of a future in which rockets would be used for space exploration. However, he was no longer at risk of being sacked – as American public opinion of Germans began to recover, von Braun found himself increasingly in a position to popularize his ideas. The 14 May 1950 headline of The Huntsville Times ("Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon") might have marked the beginning of these efforts. Von Braun's ideas rode a publicity wave that was created by science fiction movies and stories.

In 1952, von Braun first published his concept of a crewed space station in a Collier's Weekly magazine series of articles titled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!". These articles were illustrated by the space artist Chesley Bonestell and were influential in spreading his ideas. Frequently, von Braun worked with fellow German-born space advocate and science writer Willy Ley to publish his concepts, which, unsurprisingly, were heavy on the engineering side and anticipated many technical aspects of space flight that later became reality.

The space station (to be constructed using rockets with recoverable and reusable ascent stages) would be a toroid structure, with a diameter of 250 ft; this built on the concept of a rotating wheel-shaped station introduced in 1929 by Herman Potočnik in his book The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor. The space station would spin around a central docking nave to provide artificial gravity, and would be assembled in a 1,075 mi two-hour, high-inclination Earth orbit allowing observation of essentially every point on Earth on at least a daily basis. The ultimate purpose of the space station would be to provide an assembly platform for crewed lunar expeditions. More than a decade later, the movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey would draw heavily on the design concept in its visualization of an orbital space station.

Von Braun envisioned these expeditions as very large-scale undertakings, with a total of 50 astronauts traveling in three huge spacecraft (two for crew, one primarily for cargo), each 49 m long and 33 m in diameter and driven by a rectangular array of 30 rocket propulsion engines.

Upon arrival, astronauts would establish a permanent lunar base in the Sinus Roris region by using the emptied cargo holds of their craft as shelters, and would explore their surroundings for eight weeks. This would include a 400 km expedition in pressurized rovers to the crater Harpalus and the Mare Imbrium foothills.

At this time, von Braun also worked out preliminary concepts for a human mission to Mars that used the space station as a staging point. His initial plans, published in The Mars Project (1952), had envisaged a fleet of 10 spacecraft (each with a mass of 3,720 metric tonnes), three of them uncrewed and each carrying one 200-tonne winged lander  in addition to cargo, and nine crew vehicles transporting a total of 70 astronauts. The engineering and astronautical parameters of this gigantic mission were thoroughly calculated. A later project was much more modest, using only one purely orbital cargo ship and one crewed craft. In each case, the expedition would use minimum-energy Hohmann transfer orbits for its trips to Mars and back to Earth.

NASA career
Nonetheless, on 1 March 1970, von Braun and his family relocated to Washington, DC, when he was assigned the post of NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning at NASA Headquarters. After a series of conflicts associated with the truncation of the Apollo program, and facing severe budget constraints, von Braun retired from NASA on 26 May 1972. Not only had it become evident by this time that NASA and his visions for future U.S. space flight projects were incompatible, but also it was perhaps even more frustrating for him to see popular support for a continued presence of man in space wane dramatically once the goal to reach the Moon had been accomplished.

Career after NASA
Von Braun continued his work to the extent possible, which included accepting invitations to speak at colleges and universities, as he was eager to cultivate interest in human spaceflight and rocketry, particularly his desire to encourage the next generation of aerospace engineers.

Von Braun helped establish and promote the National Space Institute, a precursor of the present-day National Space Society, in 1975, and became its first president and chairman. In 1976, he became scientific consultant to Lutz Kayser, the CEO of OTRAG, and a member of the Daimler-Benz board of directors. However, his deteriorating health forced him to retire from Fairchild on 31 December 1976. When the 1975 National Medal of Science was awarded to him in early 1977, he was hospitalized, and unable to attend the White House ceremony.

Recognition and critique

 * The von Braun crater on the Moon is named after him.
 * Von Braun received a total of 12 honorary doctorates; among them, on 8 January 1963, one from the Technical University of Berlin, from which he had graduated.
 * Von Braun was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1967 for designing and developing rockets and missiles.
 * In Huntsville, Alabama:
 * Von Braun was responsible for the creation of the Research Institute at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. As a result of his vision, the university is one of the leading universities in the nation for NASA-sponsored research. The building housing the university's Research Institute was named in his honor, Von Braun Research Hall, in 2000.
 * The Von Braun Center (built in 1975) in Huntsville is named in von Braun's honor.
 * The Von Braun Astronomical Society in Huntsville was founded as the Rocket City Astronomical Association by von Braun and was later renamed after him.
 * Several German cities (Bonn, Neu-Isenburg, Mannheim, Mainz), and dozens of smaller towns have streets named after von Braun.
 * ...In February 2014, the school was finally renamed "Staatliches Gymnasium Friedberg" and distanced itself from the name von Braun, citing he was "no role-model for our pupils".
 * An avenue in the Annadale section of Staten Island, New York, was named after him in 1977.
 * Von Braun was voted into the U.S. Space and Rocket Center Hall of Fame in 2007.

Honors

 * War Merit Cross, First Class with Swords in 1943
 * Knights Cross of the War Merit Cross in 1944
 * Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1959
 * NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1969
 * Inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1969
 * National Medal of Science in 1975
 * Werner von Siemens Ring in 1975

In popular culture

 * Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) – the first city established on the moon by Earth Federation is named after him.
 * Alphaville (1965): the missing scientist played by Howard Vernon is called Professor von Braun.
 * The Right Stuff (1983): the "Chief Scientist" played by Scott Beach, being the head of the Mercury project.

Missing iconic photo with James Fletcher Apollo 15 Firing Room 1?
Perhaps my memory might be failing me, but I do remember that there used to be this photo on this wikipedia page some time back. Is there a reason why it was removed. *ahem*. I also remember this photo being on the Argentinian wikipedia, but that was removed as well I think. Could we restore this back on this and the argentinian wikipedia? Especially considering the role James Fletcher played in the Space Shuttle program. Theheezy (talk) 15:03, 26 June 2023 (UTC)


 * It does appear my memory was failing me. I found this photo through other means by googling many years back. We should certainly figure out a place on english wikipedia to add this photo especially considering the people involved and the relative human casualty rate of the apollo program vs. the space shuttle program. Theheezy (talk) 19:42, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I've added this photo to the page at Space Shuttle Program. Theheezy (talk) 19:59, 26 June 2023 (UTC)



Dates
"and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science" is later refuted in the death section where it says it was 1977. 68.207.184.244 (talk) 16:19, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Dubious Source
In the early life section, there's a few sentences that talk about a young Wernher von Braun nearly being killed in a homemade rocket car accident. However, the citation leads to an article from the Smithsonian Magazine which has no citations for any of the claims it makes. The article also has a number of factual errors, particularly towards the start of the article when it tries to make the tenuous connection between Elon Musk and Fritz von Opel. During this attempted comparison, it says that both men "start[ed their] own privately funded automobile [...] business[es]." While this may or may not be true for von Opel, it is verifiably false for Musk, as he bought Tesla from its founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. It also states that Fritz von Opel inherited his fortune while Elon Musk made his own fortune himself. This is not remotely the case, as Musk admitted himself in a 2014 interview that his father had "a private plane" and "a share in an emerald mine in Zambia." It also gets the date of the publishing of Max Valier's Der Vorstoss in den Weltraum wrong, claiming that it came out in 1925. However, as according to a paper (4th page of pdf, second paragraph) by a curator at the Smithsonian who actually bothered to cite his sources, it was originally published in 1924. It received a reprint in 1925, which may be where some of the confusion comes from, but even the smallest amount of due diligence in fact checking would have given the correct date.

Additionally, beyond the shoddy work of the Smithsonian article, the sentences in this Wikipedia page which cite it seem to paradoxically contain more content than what was written in the citation. Von Braun is mentioned in a single sentence in the article, that being: "Even 16-year old Wernher von Braun was bitten by the bug, constructing his own homemade rocket car and nearly killing himself in the process." However, in this Wikipedia page, von Braun is said to have caused a disruption in a crowded street, created the rocket car with fireworks and a toy wagon, and been taken into custody by the police until his father retrieved him. The assumption that the rocket car "detonated" is also flawed, because the article doesn't even say that he nearly killed himself after trying to fire the rockets. It says that he nearly killed himself in the "process" of "constructing his own homemade rocket car," which could mean a number of things. Maybe he accidentally inhaled some fumes he shouldn't have, or almost dropped something heavy on himself. The vagueness of the cited article combined with the strange specificity of the sentences in von Braun's Wikipedia page give me some pause.

Most damning of all is the fact that the previously mentioned paper does not mention this event happening at all. One would assume a paper on the "rocket rumble" would make a mention of such a standout example to help highlight the effects of the fad. However, even at the most opportune time the paper could talk about this happening (page 8, "[...] a number of future engineers at Peenemünde, notably Wernher von Braun, had their interest in rocketry sparked or increased by the publicity [of the Opel RAK tests]."), it doesn't make even a passing reference to the event.

With that said, I believe the sentences on the rocket car accident should either be edited, removed, or a better source for them–if any exist–should be used instead of the current one. Fungustober (talk) 20:10, 17 December 2023 (UTC)


 * ✅ I also replaced the voluminous Fritz von Opel, Max Valier and Opel-RAK details with links to the relevant articles. Ilenart626 (talk) 16:01, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Citizenship
I notice under the citizenship area it only lists USA citizenship, is there no place to find the citizenship for before USA naturalization? NoneStar (talk) 22:26, 10 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what you want. The line above says "Nationality German" (whatever that means), there are long sections of the article, Early life and Career in Germany, which discuss his time in Germany. He was clearly in Germany just prior to arriving in the US. The line "On 15 April 1955, von Braun became a naturalized citizen of the United States" is sourced. I don't think there is any reason to imagine he had any other citizenship. Johnjbarton (talk) 01:53, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Removing "List of Nazis"
In this edit @Death Editor 2 added a See Also List of Nazis, implying that von Braun is on that list. He is not.

The page List of Nazis says the criteria is "This is a list of notable figures who were active within the party". This page on Wernher von Braun says: "Overall FBI conclusions point to Von Braun's involvement in the Nazi Party to be purely for the advancement of his academic career, or out of fear of imprisonment or execution." This page gives no evidence that von Braun was "active within the party". Johnjbarton (talk) 15:32, 12 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Wernher Von Braun was a member of both the Nazi Party and the SS. He oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of inmates building his beloved rockets. His reasoning for being apart of the nazi party be damned, the most literal definition of a nazi is someone who was apart of the Nazi Party. Death Editor 2 (talk) 16:12, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * @Death Editor 2 As far as I can tell you are making these assertions based on your own opinions:
 * "He oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of inmates building his beloved rockets."
 * No source supports this claim.
 * "the most literal definition of a nazi is someone who was apart of the Nazi Party."
 * The definition in List of Nazis does not agree. The purpose of the list is to guide readers who are learning about the Nazi movement so the entries have activity in the Nazi party.
 * I know that some people believe that every person in the military is responsible for every action of the organization. However that is not a mainstream concept. Rather each person should be held responsible for their own actions. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:34, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The seventh source used for the V-2 rocket article claims that 12,000 (forced) labourers were killed building the rockets, so you are wrong. Death Editor 2 (talk) 20:26, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Your claim would put von Braun in Category:Nazi war criminals
 * Please give the source which shows that von Braun was "active within the party". That is the criteria for the List of Nazis. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:11, 12 March 2024 (UTC)
 * While I think von Braun may not match the List of Nazis criteria exactly, he was a member of the Nazi party and his work on the V-2 was part of an effort to spread the Nazi movement. He could have, for example, found another job rather than join the Nazi's in order to maintain his position. So I will remove my objection.
 * Johnjbarton (talk) 00:21, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Actually Wernher von Braun is not on the List of Nazis as it excludes SS personal, which have a separate list and by default are Nazis. Therefore you may want to use List of SS personnel instead, which already has an entry for Wernher von Braun. Ilenart626 (talk) 09:56, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Absurdities Surrounding von Braun
The article says that von Braun was made a professor by Hitler. The dictator did not have any higher education beyond primary school, did not even speak a foreign language, and promoted a leading scientist to professor.

I once saw a US documentary on the space program and the moon flight. Wernher von Braun´s name was not mentioned at all. Ontologix (talk) 04:16, 24 May 2024 (UTC)