Wernher von Braun
1912-1977
Who
Rocket engineer - technical leader of the V-2, later first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V. The most consequential rocket designer of the twentieth century, and the one whose biography will not close.
Why it matters
Both registers, kept in the same frame. The engineering: he led the team whose rocket was the first human-made object above 100 km (June 1944); his Jupiter-C lineage put America's first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit on 31 January 1958; as chief Saturn V architect he built the machine that took humans to the Moon; and his 1955-57 Disney broadcasts reached 40 million viewers a night, turning spaceflight into a schedule in the American mind. The cost: a Nazi Party member and later of the Allgemeine SS, he called joining the price of doing the work; his rocket was produced by slave labour at Mittelwerk, where about 12,000 people died; he claimed after the war to have eased conditions - survivors testified otherwise. Of surrendering his team and designs to America, he wrote that it 'was a moral decision more than anything else' - his words, set against the 12,000, are the whole card. He died in 1977, National Medal of Science in hand, Mars unreached.
Lineage
Theory (Tsiolkovsky, Oberth) and hardware (Goddard's patents) converged at Peenemunde; from there the line runs to the Redstone, to Explorer 1, to the clustered F-1 engines of the Saturn V. Whether welcomed or not, the road from Goddard's farm to the Moon runs through Peenemunde - the collection states the route, not the eulogy.