Conquering Space
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 You
have got to hand it to Werner Von Braun. Whatever his
achievements as a rocket scientist, they were as nothing compared to
his talents as a salesman. This was the man who sold Adolph
Hitler on giving him a blank cheque that busted the
Nazi war budget for a programme that built rockets that were wretched
super weapons, but superb prototype spacecraft. Then he managed
to parley his surrender to the Americans into becoming the head of
their rocket programme, and to top it off, he used a series of
articles in Collier's magazine in 1952 to sell the United States on
the idea of sending a man to the moon.
Von Braun and the science writer Willy Ley provided the main text and a series of sketches which artists such as the great Chesley Bonestell and others turned into spectacular paintings that illustrated a Moon programme that never was, yet should have been. The detail was remarkable, as the cutaway drawing above of the three-stage shuttle rocket shows. Unlike what happened with the Apollo programme that put the first men on the Moon or today's Space Shuttle, Von Braun's Collier's shuttle was playing for keeps. These weren't disposable launchers or shuttles that had expendable booster tanks. These were huge workhorses capable of carrying large crews, cargo, and every single bit was recoverable and reusable. Also, unlike today's Shuttles, these were not experimental craft to try out new technologies, but a production craft built as solid and dependable as a bomber. |
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