“That’s not my department,” says Whippet von Brown.
These are pictures I took of Wernher von Braun’s desk in Huntsville, AL! Huge thanks to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center @rocketcenterusa for allowing Kuiper to take pictures with their bust of Dr. Wernher von Braun, who himself proposed the creation of this AMAZING!! museum.
This bust was our last stop after a solid 3 hours of photographing Kuiper in the museum and @spacecampusa. My treat bag was about empty and Kuiper was toast. Thank you, THANK YOU to our extremely patient guide Moriah. ?
Wernher von Braun is not a guy I can easily sum up in under 2200 characters. Thus today I’m cheating a bit with a tiny excerpt of an enormous book I got from our local library @wccls.
The book is titled “Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War.” It was written in 2007 by Michael J. Neufeld, senior curator of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum. He’s also the lead curator of the traveling Destination Moon exhibit, featuring Apollo 11 (which I will of course post pictures of as well!) You can see it at Heinz History Center @historycenter in Pittsburgh though February 18th.?
The facts are these:
“…no one played so great a role in spaceflight and in making it come true. His historic role rests on four fundamental achievements:
(1) as technical director of the V-2 project, he led the design and construction of the world’s first large rocket and its first ballistic missile;
(2) as chief advocate for space travel in the 1950s, in Collier’s magazine, and on Walt Disney’s TV program, he helped sell the American and Western public on the feasibility of that seemingly utopian proposition;
(3) as technical director of the U.S. Army’s missile facility in Huntsville, he was instrumental in the launching of the first American satellite in 1958; and
(4) as director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, also in Huntsville, he was the consummate manager of the gigantic Saturn booster project that sent two dozen Apollo astronauts to the Moon between 1968 and 1972.”
When was the last time you visited your local library?
Original post: https://www.instagram.com/p/Btgbps1Dsiz/