biography
pronunciation:
[brown]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1912–77)
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| biography:
| Engineer and rocket expert, born in Wyrzysk, Poland (formerly Wirsitz, Germany). Developer of the V-2 flying bomb that was deployed against Britain (1944), he was one of the most important of the German weapons specialists to work on rocketry and jet propulsion in the USA after the war. Hitler personally released him when he was imprisoned on espionage charges after refusing to co-operate with Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler's attempted takeover of the V-2 project. Von Braun never approved of the military use of the rocket and surrendered willingly to American troops (1945). Signing a one-year contract with the US Army, he was flown to America, where he eventually became technical director of the US Army Ordnance Guided Missile Project in Alabama (1950). He was chiefly responsible for the manufacture and launching of the first American artificial earth satellite, Explorer I (1958). As director of the Marshall Space Flight Center (1960–70), he developed the Saturn rocket for the Apollo 8 moon landing (1969). Good-looking and outgoing, he was occasionally the butt of both humorous and serious attacks aimed at the very notion of former German scientists working for the US space programme. |
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