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Watching the Moon landing 50 years ago from his comfortable Paris home, Yves Beon could barely contain himself at the spectacle unfolding on TV. Dozens of white-shirted scientists and engineers at the Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, were on their feet, many waving flags, cheering at a triumph that was enhancing American prestige and unleashing an ocean of apple-pie patriotism. Yet Beon, a hero of the French Resistance, was spitting venom at the screen that night and, had he been alive to see last week’s documentaries repeating the footage of Neil Armstrong’s ‘giant leap for mankind’, his reaction...

The last known surviving member of the German engineering team that designed the rocket that took US astronauts to the Moon has died in Alabama. Oscar Holderer, who was 95, suffered a stroke last week and did not recover, his son Michael said. Mr Holderer was one of about 120 engineers who moved to the US after World War Two, bringing technology used in the German V2 rocket. They played a key role in the Saturn V rocket used in the 1969 Moon landing. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was part of a project called Operation Paperclip that...

Remember the time we bombed Mexico with German rockets? Germany spent the end of the 1930s and half the 1940s inventing and perfecting missiles. They made so many, they still had a ton of them left over after the end of World War II. So of course, the leftover weapons were confiscated by the United States. And here's one of the things we did with them. Anyone who knows the details about a V-2 rocket has to wonder how any nation managed to make so many of them. The V-2 ran on alcohol and liquid oxygen, only one of which...

One of the greatest rocket scientists of all time would have been 100 years old on Friday, and his legacy is being celebrated in his adopted home town of Huntsville, Ala. Wernher von Braun was a German engineer who came to the United States at the end of World War II after working for the German war effort designing the V-2 combat rocket. Despite his past and affiliation with the Nazi party, von Braun went on to build the rockets that would carry U.S. astronauts to the moon and establish America as a leader in space for decades to come....

Don't confuse German rocket scientists with Nazi war criminals who have been tried and punished, a key member of Dr. Wernher von Braun's rocket team said Sunday afternoon. Dr. Konrad Dannenberg, 94, who came to America at the end of World War II, was responding to recent criticism that the scientists came to America as war criminals and only turned to space pursuits as a way to avoid Allied prisons. The German V-2 program was developed as a long-range guided missile by von Braun and his team at Peenemunde in northern Germany, where the missiles were launched against England, but...

While cobbling together captured V-2 rockets in the Texas desert shortly after World War II, German rocket scientists called themselves POPs - "prisoners of peace" - to alleviate the sometimes tedious work of America's infant rocket program, a key member of Dr. Wernher von Braun's German rocket team said Sunday. Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, who was close to von Braun during World War II and at Redstone, said the German team is significant in history not only for the advances in rocketry and science but also because of their role as volunteers.In modern history, Stuhlinger told a group of about 200...

In... 1970, a Washington gossip columnist found herself seated at a dinner party next to rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. "One of the most fascinating men in the world has just moved to town," she gushed to her readers afterward. "The rocket genius is a brilliant conversationalist, extremely handsome and socially charming." It might seem odd to judge the mastermind of the Apollo program's Saturn V launch vehicle -- and, earlier, the German V-2 -- by his savoir faire. Yet Dr. von Braun's gift for talk and salesmanship, together with his technical skill and managerial prowess, were indispensable to his...

  Wernher von Braun     1912 - 1977  “It’s not exactly rocket science, you know.”  The cliche implies that rocket science is the epitome of something that is difficult, obscure, and abstruse; something comprehensible only by the brainiest of the smart.  Names that qualify for the title “father of rocket science” include Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and von Braun.  But Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was mostly a visionary and chalkboard theorist, and Robert Goddard only targeted the upper atmosphere for his projects; he was also secretive and suspicious of others to a fault.  Of the three, and any others that could be listed,...