Rocket center Peenemünde — Personal memories
1994; Elsevier BV; Volume: 34; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/0094-5765(94)90274-7
ISSN1879-2030
AutoresKonrad Dannenberg, Ernst Stuhlinger,
Tópico(s)Twentieth Century Scientific Developments
ResumoVon Braun built his first rockets as a young teenager. At 14, he started making plans for rockets for human travel to the Moon and Mars. The German Army began a rocket program in 1929. Two years later, Colonel (later General) Becker contacted von Braun who experimented with rockets in Berlin, gave him a contract in 1932, and, jointly with the Air Force, in 1936 built the rocket center Peenemünde where von Braun and his team developed the A-4 (V-2) rocket under Army auspices, while the Air Force developed the V-1 (buzz bomb), wire-guided bombs, and rocket planes. Albert Speer, impressed by the work of the rocketeers, allowed a modest growth of the Peenemünde project; this brought Dannenberg to the von Braun team in 1940. Hitler did not believe in rockets; he ignored the A-4 project until 1942 when he began to support it, expecting that it could turn the fortunes of war for him. He drastically increased the Peenemünde work force and allowed the transfer of soldiers from the front to Peenemünde; that was when Stuhlinger, in 1943, came to Peenemünde as a Pfc.-Ph.D. Later that year, Himmler wrenched the authority over A-4 production out of the Army's hands, put it under his command, and forced production of the immature rocket at Mittelwerk, and its military deployment against targets in France, Belgium, and England. Throughout the development of the A-4 rocket, von Braun was the undisputed leader of the project. Although still immature by the end of the war, the A-4 had proceeded to a status which made it the first successful long-range precision rocket, the prototype for a large number of military rockets built by numerous nations after the war, and for space rockets that launched satellites and traveled to the Moon and the planets.
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