Page 40 - July18LivingSCCLmagazine

The Moon Rocket
A Saturn V, the space vehicle for the first lunar landing mission, is rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building and down the 3.5 mile crawlerway to Launch Complex 39-A of the Kennedy Space Center May 20, 1969.
By Greg Douglas
It is May 1945, the closing weeks of World War II. The US and the Russians are moving quickly to capture German scientists as well as German technology. Many German scientists, moreover, were fleeing to the West to avoid being captured by the Russians.
Among the escaping scientists was Wernher von Braun, the technical director of the Nazi rocket program, who had been instrumental in the design and development of the V-2 rocket. Von Braun and 500 members of his technical team fled to Austria where they surrendered to the US Army. After being vetted, they were secretly transferred to the US along with documents, technical drawings, and 100 V-2 rockets. The Von Braun team would work for the Army missile program from 1946- 1959 at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama.
The launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, followed
by Russia’s spectacular 1961 achievement of putting the first man in space, caught the US by surprise and was an embarrassment to the fledgling NASA program. The US needed to accelerate its space program development, and quickly.
In 1960, NASA created the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, with Von Braun as its first director and chief architect of the future Saturn V. NASA
engineers, along with Von Braun’s German engineers, began the design and development of the heavy lift Saturn rocket, but its mission was uncertain.
40 LIVING @ SCCL, July 2018
Saturn V
Dr. Wernher von Braun stands next to the massive F-1 engines that lifted the Saturn V off the launch pad and into space. (NASA)