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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.
Here
we can see the interior of the shuttle cabin. No spacious flight
deck here. It was as cramped yet efficient as a cargo carrier.
It also showed a safety-consciousness that the designers of the real
Space Shuttle are only now coming to grips with.
Okay,
but what are the funny looking seats for?
Would
you believe it? They're ejector seats. In the event of an
emergency, the seats telescope shut into metal cylinders that float
down to Earth on steel mesh parachutes. Man in a can, indeed.
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 
