Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) by William E. Burrows

A specter is haunting NASA (not Europe…). It is a victim of its own success, and it is therefore an agency without a mission as profoundly important as the one that got its astronauts to the Moon six times from 1969 to 1972. But there is a new mission, and it is far more important.
    NASA's seeds were planted at the imaginatively named First Annual Symposium on Space Travel, which was held at the Hayden Planetarium in New York in October 1951. The event's organizer was Wernher von Braun, the charismatic German aristocrat who masterminded the slave-labor program that made the rocket-propelled V-2 ballistic missiles—the “vengeance weapons”—that rained down on London and elsewhere in the closing stages of the Second World War. He and a little more than a hundred of his colleagues turned themselves and a veritable mountain of blueprints and other technical documents over to the US Army in the closing weeks of the war in an operation first called Overcast and then Paperclip. With the Soviet Union quickly looming as a menace, and the place of the ballistic missile in warfare clearly established, von Braun and six of his top echelon, together with the cache of documents, were spirited to the United States, where they were out of reach of Joseph Stalin's feared Red Army. Six of the “prisoners of peace” (as von Braun called them) were taken to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland where they were put to work translating, evaluating, and cataloging the documents. Their leader was taken to Fort Bliss, Texas, as the advanceman for the rest of the rocket team and eventually to the Army Ordnance Guided Missile Center at the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where they designed constantly improved (and ever larger) ballistic missiles. It was at Redstone that von Braun created the gigantic Saturn V rocket that would get six Apollo crews on the Moon.
    But von Braun had long since metamorphosed from being a master rocketeer to being a handsome and personable visionary—a space savant—and a publicly recognized celebrity who believed that it was humankind's destiny to explore space and, as the saying of the time went, conquer it. He was to become the face of space for millions of Americans who emerged from the Second World War with a craving to extend their civilization to inhabiting the space around their planet and then extending it to the Moon and to Mars. Walt Disney understood that and capitalized on it by making Tomorrowland one of the four theme parks at Disneyland in California. (One of the others, Frontierland, featured Davy Crockett, who became another American television hero played by Fess Parker, and that had millions of kids wearing coonskin hats, complete with tails.) Typical of Disney's genius, he offered von Braun a consulting job on the project, and the visionary eagerly accepted it. Following that, von Braun took a consultant position on Disney's television show, called Disneyland , to work on the “Man in Space” episode, which aired on March 9, 1955, boasting that it was “science factual.”
    â€œIf we were to start today on an organized, well supported space program, I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within ten years,” von Braun said on camera. “Now here is my design for a four-stage orbital rocket ship…” A second segment, “Man and the Moon,” which Disney Studios claimed was a “realistic and believable trip to the Moon in a rocket ship,” showed von Braun with an excellent prop in his shirt pocket: a slide rule. 1 And he was as knowledgeable and propheticas he was charismatic, of course, and therefore attracted a coterie of like-minded individuals who had science and engineering backgrounds and who enjoyed writing about it.
    They came together at the symposium on space flight, which was held at the Hayden Planetarium in 1951, which was sponsored by Collier's magazine. The magazine's