1912-1977

German-American Rocket Engineer

Wernher von Braun developed the world's first guided missiles for the German military during World War II. After the war, his rockets were used to launch America's first space probes, and he supervised the development of the Saturn rockets that took astronauts to the Moon during the Apollo era.

Von Braun was born on March 23, 1912, in Wirsitz, Germany (now Wyrzysk, Poland), into a wealthy family. His boyhood interest in astronomy was encouraged by his mother, and he built an observatory at the boarding school he attended. He did not, however, do particularly well in his physics and mathematics classes, until frustration in trying to understand a book by the rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth (1894-1989) motivated him to apply himself. In 1930 he began attending the Berlin Institute of Technology, where he joined the German Society for Space...