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14.04.1955 Wernher von Braun został zaprzysiężony na obywatela USA.
Wernher von Braun becomes a US citizen.
Braun’s U.S. citizenship swearing-in ceremony, April 14, 1955
https://bsky.app/profile/contactlight.de/post/3lmsfwqmz3222Wernher von Braun, Rocket Pioneer, Dies
By John Noble Wilford June 18, 1977
Wernher vcn Braun, the master rocket builder and pioneer of space travel, died of cancer Thursday morning. He was 65 years old.
The German‐born scientist, who had been in failing health for two years, died at a hospital in Alexandria, Va. A private funeral service was held later in the day, but no public announcement was made until yesterday. He leaves his wife and three children.
In a statement released by the White House, President Carter eulogized Dr. von Braun as “a man of bold vision” and said:
“To millions of Americans, Wernher von Braun's name was inextricably linked to our exploration of space and to the creative application of technology. Not just the people of our nation, but all the people of the world have profited from his work. We will continue to profit from his example.”
Dr. von Braun was best known for two achievements‐the German V‐2 rocket and the American Saturn 5 moon rocket. One, a dreaded weapon of warfare, was a precursor of the other, a vehicle of magnificent human adventure.
Both sprang from a lifetime commitment to a romantic vision. Long before space travel became a reality, Dr. von Braun committed himself to a vision of rockets breaking the bonds of the Earth's gravity, of men making journeys to the Moon and beyond, of worlds to explore and incorporate in the human experience.
While a student in Berlin, he read an article about an imaginary• trip to the moon that made a lasting impression, which he once recalled:
“It filled me with a romantic urge. Interplanetary travel! Here was a task worth dedicating one's life to. Not just stare through a telescope at the Moon and the planets but to soar through the heavens and actually explore the mysterious universe. I knew how Columbus had felt.”
A Vision Realized
Dr. von Braun went on to live his vision. And his life spanned and helped shape an exciting era‐the era of tinkering with rockets that often fizzled, of shepherciing a team of German missile men who became a nucleus of the American space program, of firing the enthusiasm of earthbound minds, of running to catch up with the Russians after Sputnik in 1957, of building the mammoth moon rocket that fulfilled a dream of centuries.
In time and through success Dr. von Braun's name, perhaps more than any other, became synonymous with space travel.
Once, walking away from the press site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, while the orange cloud of smoke from a blastoff still hugged the ground, drifting off to sea, Dr. von Braun smiled broadly at his latest success, brushed back his graying blond hair and recalled something Jules Verne had said.
“Anything one man can imagine,” said Verne, who more than a century before wrote of men flying to the Moon, “other men can make real.”
It was typical von Braun. An articulate and sometimes eloquent man, he was given to literary and historical allusions. He liked to compare space exploration to Lindbergh, the Wright brothers and Columbus. When he completed an analogy he liked particularly well, he would break into a slightly lopsided smile, arch his eyebrows and look to make sure the listener got his point.
The Larger Meaning
And his point usually had to do with what he believed was the larger meaning of space exploration.
At a news conference a few days before the launching of Apollo 11 in July 19&l, several officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration groped in their engineering lexicon for phrases to capture the significance of man's first. landing on the Moon.
Words failed all of them save one, Dr. von Braun. To him the moon flight was nothing less than a step in human evolution comparable to the time when life on earth emerged from the sea and established itself on land.
Whether it was an overblown analogy remains for future geneettIons to determine. But it was true to Dr. von Braun's vision, and if it turns out to be close to the truth, much of the credit for such a transcendent achievement must go to Dr. von Braun's pioneering efforts.
Wernher von Braun was born March 23, 1912, in Wirsitz, East Prussia (now part of Poland), one of three sons of Prussian aristocrat who became Secretary of Agriculture in the Weimar Government.
His first spaceward influence may have come from his parents.
“For my confirmation,” he said, “I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got telescope.”
After young Wernher decided that space travel was his life's goal, he realized that he must master mathematics, even though he disliked the subject and found it difficult. In 1932 he graduated from the Berlin Technological Institute, and two years later won his doctorate in physics at the University of Berlin.
He was already embarked on his career in rocketry, which upset his father, Baron Magnus von Braun, who had assumed that his son would take up the dignified duties of a Prussian landholder.
An Explorer Only
In 1930, as a boy of 18, he began experimenting with small rockets, paying his own bills and using a municipal dump on the outskirts of Berlin. He and his fellow enthusiasts called the site the Raketenflugplatz, or Rocket Flight Place. Most of his associates were equally young and amateurish, but one of their mentors was Dr. Hermann Oberth, an expert in rocket fuels who had inspired many young German rocketeer.
One day, in 1932, a black sedan stopped by the dump and three German Army men in mufti stepped out. The Versailles Treaty, concluding World War I, had said nothing about barring rockets to Germany, and when the three men climbed back into the black sedan they had Dr. von Braun's joyful consent to carry on his experiments with the full sanction‐and financial support‐of the Army.
Dr. von Braun said later that he had felt no moral scruples at the time about the possible abuse of his test rockets in war. He was, he said, interested solely in exploring space.
At any rate, at the age of 20 he became the German Army's top civilian specialist in rocketry, a boy wonder on his way to becoming the chief designer of Hitler's V‐2 rocket‐Vergeltungswaffe Zwei, or Revenge Weapon Two.
When, in 1937, the Army urged Dr. von Braun to find more suitable grounds for testing, the scientist's mother suggested a desolate site on the Baltic Sea where his grandfather had gone duck hunting for years. This marked the beginning of the secret experimental rocket base at Peenemilnde and of an on‐again‐off‐again relationship between Dr. von Braun and Hitler.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/18/archives/wernher-von-braun-rocket-pioneer-dies.html2)
Stephane SEBILE @spacemen1969 Last edited 12:25 AM · Sep 16, 2025
16 septembre 1960
Cette photo a été prise il y a tout juste 65 ans...
(je l'ai réaccentuée)
https://twitter.com/spacemen1969/status/1967716384005320921
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