* Astronomy

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RE: Dr. Wernher von Braun

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Von Braun's Futurist Papers To Be Auctioned
Rocket Engineer's Sketches Helped Launch the Space Age

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Dr. Wernher von Braun's early blueprints for space exploration will be up for bid at a prestigious New York auction house next week. Drawings signed by von Braun will be put up for auction at the London-based Bonhams New York location beginning 9 a.m. Wednesday.
The drawings were the basis for the popular 1950s "Man Will Conquer Space Soon" series of articles in Collier's magazine and are thought by many space experts and historians to be the source material for many of NASA's future ideas such as the Saturn V moon rocket and space shuttle.

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A once top-secret manuscript that is widely recognised as a milestone in the development of modern rockets is to go under the hammer in New York today.
Wernher von Braun, the Nazi physicist-turned-leading figure in US space exploration, created the 166-page document for his PhD dissertation in April 1934. It contains the scientist's handwritten annotations as well as his charts and graphs.
Von Braun was awarded a doctorate in physics on the basis of the dissertation, but its contents were considered so pivotal to the future of rocket development that it was seized by the German military and remained classified until 1960.

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Wernher von Braun's Nazi past haunted his work in the U.S. space program.

"Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War" by Michael J. Neufeld (Alfred A. Knopf, 590 pages, $35)

At the height of his celebrity, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was the subject of a 1960 Hollywood biopic, "I Aim for the Stars." But the moral ambiguity of his career was devastatingly captured by comic Mort Sahl, who joked that the movie's subtitle should read, "But Sometimes I Hit London."

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Atlanta federal archive may have 'Monday Notes' of von Braun
A complete set of Apollo-era memos and papers considered by many aerospace historians as a "Holy Grail" of insight into how Dr. Wernher von Braun managed America's rocket programs may have been discovered in an Atlanta federal archive, Marshall Space Flight Centre's chief historian said.
Von Braun's "Monday Notes," which he used to monitor the various Marshall teams' progress on NASA's rocket and lunar exploration developments, may have been located at the National Archives Southeast Region facility in Atlanta, Marshall historian Mike Wright said.
To manage the highly complex space programs, Wright said, von Braun used a system of communication where Marshall branch chiefs and department heads would forward memos citing progress, success and failure on various programs.
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Don't confuse German rocket scientists with Nazi war criminals who have been tried and punished, a key member of SS Major 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 Allied bombing forced production into a massive underground factory called Mittelwerk, located near Nordhausen, Germany.
Nazi leaders used death camp labourers for some of the Mittelwerk construction work tasks; conditions were harsh and many died.

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