Wernher Von Braun Facts
Wernher Von Braun Facts
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| Interesting Wernher Von Braun Facts: |
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| Wernher Von Braun was born into a noble family in Wirsitz, now known as Wyrzysk, Poland. |
| His father was the Minister of Agriculture in the Reich Cabinet. |
| When von Braun was confirmed in the Lutheran Church his mother gave him a telescope. |
| He fell in love with astronomy and became a study of physics and mathematics. |
| In 1915 von Braun's father accepted a position in the Ministry of the Interior. |
| Von Braun was a gifted musician on the piano and the cello and was a student of Paul Hindemith. |
| In 1925 he entered a school at Ettersburg Castle and in 1928 he transferred to the Hermann-Lietz-Internat school. |
| In 1930 he entered the Technische Hochschule in Berlin where he joined the Spaceflight Society. |
| In 1932 he earned a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. |
| In 1934 he received a Master's degree in physics from the Friedrich Wilhelm University. |
| On November 12, 1937, he joined the Nazi Party. |
| He would later claim that his membership in both the Nazi Party and the SS were coerced. |
| When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933 the military uses of rocketry was of major interest to them. |
| On July 27, 1934 von Braun received his PhD with a thesis entitled Construction, Theoretical and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket. |
| His thesis was classified by the Army and not released until 1960. |
| By 1934, Braun's team had launched two rockets to altitudes of two miles. |
| Before World War II began German scientists had been in contact with Robert Goddard and asked him technical questions about their own efforts. |
| During 1936 Braun's team worked on using rockets to propel aircraft and in June 1937 they tested the first primitive jet airplane. |
| Unfortunately Braun's rocket facility used slave labor from the near-by concentration camp and it is claimed that visited it frequently and was aware of the brutality and deaths. |
| In 1945, knowing that the war was lost, von Braun and his team located and surrendered to the U.S. 44th Infantry. |
| From 1950 to 1970 von Braun and his team were at the US Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama where they worked on ballistic missiles. |
| On January 1, 1958 the Jupiter-C rocket they developed launched America's first satellite. |
| This was the first event in the American space program. |
| Von Braun's primary interest was in spaceflight and at Huntsville he was finally free to popularize that idea. |
| He wrote numerous articles and worked as technical director for Walt Disney on two films about space exploration. |
| He worked on the Apollo program which sent astronauts to the moon. |
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