Moondust by Andrew Smith Page B

of Chris Kraft, “Wernher von Braun built a masterpiece.”
    Wernher von Braun: his spirit haunts Apollo like a spectre. Reg Turnill’s eldest son was born prematurely when one of the first V-2 rocket-bombs von Braun designed during World War II fell on Sydenham in South London. It was years before Reg could bring himself to shake the German’s hand. To begin with, his thick accent and mouth full of metal teeth were “quite revolting for the viewer,” but one day Reg turned around and, lo, the engineer was speaking perfect English through a gallery of gleaming white teeth. Flight director Chris Kraft found his presence troubling at first, too, and claims to have contemplated punching him on their first meeting out of disgust at his background: NASA’s much-loved first director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), Robert Gilruth, sought to assuage his deputy with the words “von Braun doesn’t care what flag he fights for.” But in the end, most NASA folk seem to have adored him. Astronauts have frequently referred to him as a genius, a visionary, someone they respected and loved to spend time with.
    The traditional view of von Braun has been of a modern-day Mephisto or Faust. He’d dreamed since boyhood of taking his species into space, and when the dream looked most likely to be realized by the Nazis, this son of an aristocrat signed up as an SS officer. Later, at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, explained that he and the Party had “exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task.” Perhaps we can understand this. And as the war was racing toward a conclusion, von Braun led 150 of his top engineers and their families on a hazardous dash across Germany so that they might surrender to the Americans rather than to the rapidly advancing Soviets. Whether he was acting out of compassion or because he knew the presence of his teamwould strengthen his bargaining position is impossible to know – although it’s worth noting that he left many behind. Either way, 118 of them joined von Braun behind barbed wire as “prisoners of peace,” until the Cold War was ratcheted up in Korea (1950–53), and the Germans were unpacked and moved to the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Alabama, with Nazi pasts conveniently forgotten.
    Wags began referring to Huntsville as “Hunsville” – they still do – but from this time on, there was no stopping von Braun and his team, which is widely regarded as one of the most talented groups of engineers ever assembled. In the Fifties he became a powerful advocate of space exploration, never shy of tweaking Americans’ fear of Soviet domination in this exotic new realm, even fronting a kids’ TV series on the subject for Walt Disney (notoriously no liberal himself). Apollo could not have happened without him and he is the
only
person of whom this might be said. His best biographer will point out to me that Stanley Kubrick used to get tetchy when people assumed the mad German adviser Peter Sellers played in
his
Cold War masterpiece,
Dr. Strangelove,
to have been based on Henry Kissinger. The only German with the ear of a president when the film was being made in 1963 was von Braun.
    Even at this stage, though, as I crane my neck to gape at his work, I’m aware that history books have begun to be rewritten on the subject of von Braun. His V-2 rocket had been made with European slave labour in caves under the spectacular Harz Mountains of central Germany, but von Braun was always allowed to deny any involvement in, or even knowledge of, these crimes. Dr. Arthur Rudolph, who was in charge of production there and would later work under von Braun as manager of the Saturn V programme at Huntsville, was awarded NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal in 1969, but later forced to flee the U.S. when a media