Anyone who has visited Huntsville knows how important Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team are to the town’s residents. Even a casual observer will notice that von Braun’s iconic name and image are featured on or in multiple public institutions, such as the airport, the civic center, multiple buildings at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and on Redstone Arsenal, and least surprisingly, the United States Space & Rocket Center.
“Where are we drifting?” asked Thomas Fearn on the eve of the Civil War, “and at what point shall we land? God grant that it may end as well with us, as with the great many too.” Fearn was not an overly religious man, but he had reasons for invoking this small prayer. The Huntsville resident was seventy-two years old and not in good health; his career as a medical doctor had long passed, so too had his work as a cotton merchant, public works champion, and institution builder. What was left—his family, his farms, and his slaves— would soon be under siege from advancing Union forces. The date was August 5, 1965. Wernher von Braun, the world's most famous rocket expert, stands on the roof of a ten-story building at NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and looks south coward the Tennessee River. Two miles away, sealed in a concrete bunker with sixteeninch-thick walls, a group of engineers peers through periscopes; meanwhile, other team members push buttons on the bunker's steel-gray consoles. As von Braun and the engineers watch, a continuous plume of flame biases from the base of a mammoth concrete structure several hundred yards from the bunker. Thunder roll. Smoke billows. For two and a half minutes hell unfolds. Alabama has become, as writer Bob Lionel lacer wrote, "the land of the Earth-shakers." The sound and fury generated that day resulted from the test-firing of the first stage of the Saturn moon rocket. Throughout the 1960s, Huntsvillians would hear and feel that roar many times as ASA scientists aimed for the goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961-- "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Before the end of the decade, the goal would be reached, and on July 16, 1969, a mammoth rocket, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty, would leave the launch pad in Florida carrying three human beings toward the surface of the moon. |
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