Wernher Von Braun

On March 1, 1947, he married his maternal cousin in a Lutheran Church in Germany. The couple had three children.

On April 15, 1955, he received his naturalized American citizenship.

At the age of 65, Wernher von Braun died of pancreatic cancer in Alexandria, Virginia. He was buried at the ‘Ivy Hill Cemetery’ in Virginia.

Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun, was the second of the three sons born in a wealthy aristocratic family in Wirsitz, Germany. His father Magnus Freiherr von Braun, served as a Minister of Agriculture in the Federal Cabinet during the Weimar Republic. His mother, Emmy von Quistorp could trace her lineage to medieval European royalty

In 1925, he moved with his family to Berlin, where he began reading Hermann Oberth’s ‘The Rocket into Interplanetary Space’, which incited his interest in science and mathematics.

In 1930, he enrolled to the Berlin Institute of Technology and during this time, he joined the German Society for Space Travel, where he engaged himself in liquid-fuelled rocket tests in his spare time.

In 1932, he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, after which, he joined the University of Berlin to study Physics.

Captain Walter R.Dornberger, who was in charge of solid-fuel rocket research, helped this young rocket scientist to obtain a research grant from the Ordnance Department in Germany. Captain Walter was convinced of the young scientist’s competence and the underlying military potential of liquid-fuel rockets.

In 1934, his team successfully launched two liquid-fuel rockets that rose to a height of 2.2 and 3.5 km, respectively.

In the early 1940s, he and his team worked with Captain Dornberger at Peenemunde, Germany, and developed the long range ballistic missile, A-4, which later came to be known as the V-2.

In 1945, Braun and his entire team surrendered to the American troops willingly and were at the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps test site at White Sands, where they reworked on the captured V-2s for ‘high altitude’ research studies.

In 1952, he was made the technical head of the U.S. Army Ordnance Guided Missile Project in Alabama, where his team successfully launched Jupiter-C, Redstone, Pershing and Juno missiles.

In January 1958, Braun and his team launched the first American artificial earth satellite, ‘Explorer I’.

Braun’s name is synonymous with the V-2 rocket. In the 1940s, he worked With Captain Walter R.Dornberger and they successfully launched missiles which included the A-4. Later, it came to be known as the V-2 which means ‘Vengeance Weapon-2’. In 1944, the V-2 bomb was deployed by German forces against the Britain troops as Adolf Hitler was keen on using it for military purposes.