Von Braun Quotes

One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions.

Basic research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I am doing.

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.

Everything science has taught me strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.

The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.

I'm convinced that before the year 2000 is over, the first child will have been born on the moon.

All one can really leave one's children is what's inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.

You can’t have a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

Our sun is one of a 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living thing in that enormous immensity.

We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven.

By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun.

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

One test result is the worth one-thousand expert opinions.

Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.

We've got gravity licked but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

Crash programs fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.

I have learned to use the world ‘impossible’ with the greatest caution.

And don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there [space]. Man belongs wherever he wants to go — and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.

Nature does not know extinction, only transformation

Architect Wernher Von Braun had this to say on the matter: “One good test is worth a thousand expert opinions.

Wernher von Braun. As his designs, built on Goddard’s inventions, rained ruin on London, von Braun’s genius for rocketry became all too obvious. He gave Adolf Hitler

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. —WERNHER VON BRAUN

The barrier ascribed to Von Braun’s deathbed-like confession can be ascribed to the deadly and impenetrable radiation belts known as the Van Allen Belts. NASA’s Engineer and spokesman, Kelly Smith, admits, “As we get further away from earth,

Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.

I believe it is time to explode once and for all the theory of the solitary space rocket and its little band of bold interplanetary adventurers,” von Braun wrote. “No such lonesome, extra-orbital thermos bottle will ever escape earth’s gravity and drift toward Mars.

Von Braun and his team had just launched America’s first successful satellite, Explorer I, and as far as the public was concerned, von Braun’s star was on the rise. But Army intelligence had information on von Braun that the rest of the world most definitely did not, namely, that he had been an officer with the Nazi paramilitary organization the SS during the war and that he was implicated in the deaths of thousands of slave laborers forced to build the V-2 rocket, in an underground labor-concentration camp called Nordhausen, in Nazi Germany.

Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun’s relatively small voice, darting eyes, and semaphoric presentations of lip made it obvious he was a man of opposites. He

He didn't say anything. He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time after that, sculling along the surface of the sea of pain a little nearer to his story's end or maybe, if that great eschatologist Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun turned out to be right, toward story on the opposite shore that was waiting to begin.

In Zukunft wird sich die Utopie beeilen müssen, wenn sie die Realität einholen will.

In future utopia will need to hurry to keep up with reality.

You can’t have a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant

Conquering the universe one has to solve two problems: gravity and red tape. We could have mastered gravity.

Over the course of that long day in Nordhausen my grandfather gave up the dream he had shared with the Werner von Braun of his imaginings. Along with it a half hour of something that had felt like peace. When those things were gone, there was a bad moment as my grandfather found himself confronted once more with the void that surrounded the planet of his heart.

Natura nu cunoaște dispariția. Ea cunoaște doar transformarea. Tot ce m-a învățat știința și mă învață în continuare îmi întărește credința în perpetuarea existenței noastre spirituale după moarte.

Geveden, in his own way, was in favor of balancing the typical, formal process culture with a dose of informal individualism, as Kranz and von Braun once had. “The chain of communication has to be informal,” he told me, “completely different from the chain of command.” He wanted a culture where everyone had the responsibility to protest if something didn’t feel right. He decided to go prospecting for doubts.

Wernher von Braun, who led the Marshall Space Flight Center’s development of the rocket that propelled the moon mission, balanced NASA’s rigid process with an informal, individualistic culture that encouraged constant dissent and cross-boundary communication. Von Braun started “Monday Notes”: every week engineers submitted a single page of notes on their salient issues. Von Braun handwrote comments in the margins, and then circulated the entire compilation. Everyone saw what other divisions were up to, and how easily problems could be raised. Monday Notes were rigorous, but informal.

Between him and Father Johannes Nickel, as between two stars, lay unbridgeable gulfs of space-time. And yet across the sweep of that desolation each had swum, for a moment, into the other’s lens. Poor von Braun! He needed to know—my grandfather felt that he must find him and tell him—that such a thing was possible. Scattered in the void were minds capable of understanding, of reaching one another. He would put his hand on von Braun’s shoulder the way the old priest’s gnarled paw now lay benedictive on his own. He would transmit to von Braun the only message lonely slaves of gravity might send: We see you—we are here.

Albert Einstein, considered the most influential person of the 20th century, was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. His parents thought he was retarded. He spoke haltingly until age nine. He was advised by a teacher to drop out of grade school: “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” Isaac Newton, the scientist who invented modern-day physics, did poorly in math. Patricia Polacco, a prolific children’s author and illustrator, didn’t learn to read until she was 14. Henry Ford, who developed the famous Model-T car and started Ford Motor Company, barely made it through high school. Lucille Ball, famous comedian and star of I Love Lucy, was once dismissed from drama school for being too quiet and shy. Pablo Picasso, one of the great artists of all time, was pulled out of school at age 10 because he was doing so poorly. A tutor hired by Pablo’s father gave up on Pablo. Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the world’s great composers. His music teacher once said of him, “As a composer, he is hopeless.” Wernher von Braun, the world-renowned mathematician, flunked ninth-grade algebra. Agatha Christie, the world’s best-known mystery writer and all-time bestselling author other than William Shakespeare of any genre, struggled to learn to read because of dyslexia. Winston Churchill, famous English prime minister, failed the sixth grade.

von Braun went looking for problems, hunches, and bad news. He even rewarded those who exposed problems. After Kranz and von Braun’s time, the “All Others Bring Data” process culture remained, but the informal culture and power of individual hunches shriveled. In 1974, William Lucas took over the Marshall Space Flight Center. A NASA chief historian wrote that Lucas was a brilliant engineer but “often grew angry when he learned of problems.” Allan McDonald described him to me as a “shoot-the-messenger type guy.” Lucas transformed von Braun’s Monday Notes into a system purely for upward communication. He did not write feedback and the notes did not circulate. At one point they morphed into standardized forms that had to be filled out. Monday Notes became one more rigid formality in a process culture. “Immediately, the quality of the notes fell,” wrote another official NASA historian.

Er stand einen Moment und sah auf den offenen Körper unter den weißen Tüchern. Das grelle Licht machte die Tücher noch weißer, wie frischer Schnee, unter dem der rote Krater der klaffenden Wunde gähnte. Kate Hegström, vierunddreißig Jahre alt, kapriziös, schmal, braun, trainiert, voll von Willen zum Leben – zum Tode verurteilt durch den neblig unsichtbaren Griff, der ihre Zellen zerstört hatte. Er beugte sich wieder über den Körper. „Wir müssen ja noch –“ Das Kind. In diesem zerfallenden Körper wuchs ja noch blind ein tappendes Leben heran. Verurteilt mit ihm. Noch fressend, saugend, gierig, nichts als Trieb zum Wachsen, irgendetwas, das einmal spielen wollte in Gärten, das irgendetwas werden wollte, Ingenieur, Priester, Soldat, Mörder, Mensch, etwas, das leben, leiden, glücklich sein wollte und zerbrechen – vorsichtig ging das Instrument die unsichtbare Wand entlang – fand den Widerstand, brach ihn behutsam, brachte ihn heraus – vorbei. Vorbei mit all dem unbewußten Kreisen, vorbei mit dem ungelebten Atem, Jubel, Klage, Wachsen, Werden. Nichts mehr als etwas totes, bleiches Fleisch und etwas gerinnendes Blut.

Security Division of NASA: Headed by Werner von Braun. Nazi headquarters were moved to the Caribbean after World War II. The National Security Council, patterned after Hitler’s intelligence apparat, provided the framework inside the White House for political assassinations, Watergate “Plumbers” and election manipulations. Agents from military intelligence and the armed forces were concealed inside defense projects. The Syndicate worked with the Defense Industrial Security Command. Robert Sheridan, appointed by George McGovern to “investigate Watergate for the Democrats,” was the direct liaison to departments involved in the Kennedy assassination. The Watergate parallels are too great to not suspect a continuous working of this operation.28

The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, “Is there any reason why it won’t work?” to which they answer: “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, “Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines.”]

In 1946, after the World War II, the head of the Nazi V2 missile project Herman Von Braun, and additional Nazi rocket scientists, were brought to the United States under a project run by the Office of Special Services (predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency) known as Operation Paperclip.

Dollmann was fond of Braun, and a sweet and simple young woman who confided her sad life to him. She was known throughout the world as the German strongman's mistress, but, as she confessed to Dollmann, there was no sexual intimacy between her and the Führer. 'He says to me that his only love is Germany and to forget it, even for a moment, would shatter the mystical forces of his mission.' ¶ Dollmann strongly suspected that the Führer had other passions besides Germany. On Christmas Eve 1923, when he was a university student in Munich, Dollman had been invited to an extravagant, candelit party at the house of General Otto von Lossow, who had helped put down Hitler's Beer Hall putsch in November 1923. During the evening, Lossow took Dollmann and some of his other guests into his parlor, where he entertained them by reading selections from Hitler's thick police dossier. 'In a café near the university on the evening of, Herr Hitler was observed . . . " Lossow's voice was matter-of-fact as he read through the depositions and eyewitness reports about Germany's future leader. The general's small audience listened in rapt silence, transfixed by the portrait of a Hitler who was more interested in boyish men than in national politics.

Dollmann was fond of Braun, and a sweet and simple young woman who confided her sad life to him. She was known throughout the world as the German strongman's mistress, but, as she confessed to Dollmann, there was no sexual intimacy between her and the Führer. 'He says to me that his only love is Germany and to forget it, even for a moment, would shatter the mystical forces of his mission.' ¶ Dollmann strongly suspected that the Führer had other passions besides Germany. On Christmas Eve 1923, when he was a university student in Munich, Dollman had been invited to an extravagant, candelit party at the house of General Otto von Lossow, who had helped put down Hitler's Beer Hall putsch in November 1923. During the evening, Lossow took Dollmann and some of his other guests into his parlor, where he entertained them by reading selections from Hitler's thick police dossier. 'In a café near the university on the evening of, Herr Hitler was observed . . . ' Lossow's voice was matter-of-fact as he read through the depositions and eyewitness reports about Germany's future leader. The general's small audience listened in rapt silence, transfixed by the portrait of a Hitler who was more interested in boyish men than in national politics.

Werner Heisenberg Walks into a Bar Werner Heisenberg walks into a bar. The bartender asks, 'What will you have? Heisenberg ponders the question for 30 seconds and says, 'I'm still uncertain. There is a fuzziness in nature, a fundamental limit to what I can know about the behavior of quantum particles in the liquor in that shot glass. On these subatomic scales, the most I can hope for is to calculate probabilities for where the liquor is and how it will behave once it enters my bloodstream.' The bartender says, 'Listen egghead, stop your jabbering. This is not rocket science. Either order a drink or get the fuck out of my bar.' Heisenberg leaves in frustration and at that very moment, in walks the rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun. The bartender grabs his bat from behind the bar and says to himself, 'Achh scheiße, here comes trouble.

Don’t say that he’s hypocritical Say rather that he’s apolitical. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? “That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

Halloween (known among European pagans as Samhain, pronounced “sa-wen”) is traditionally the day when the dead return to visit the living, similar to the Asian “Wandering Souls” festival mentioned above. It is the day when the gate between the living and the dead is open, a favorite day for evocations of spirits and demons. Candlemas, on the other hand, is the day of “quickening,” when the earth begins to wake from its slumber, a day of promise for the future, of the celebration of fertility, of anticipation for the bounty of the coming year. One could say, therefore, that the first rocket launch on Halloween was an evocation of the daimon of flight, or perhaps in a darker context a breaching of the barrier between this world and the next, an initiatic rending of the veil of the Temple: space being seen as the domain of both the dead and the higher spiritual forces. The actual birth of the American space program on Candlemas is, of course, also an auspicious event, ripe with mythical connotations. It is not the intention of this author to suggest that the selection of these dates was deliberate on the part of von Karman, Parsons, von Braun or the other space engineers. Indeed, by the time of the Explorer I launch in 1958 Parsons himself had already been dead six years. It is the intention, however, to point out these synchronicities as they occur, because they are evidence of deeper, more sinister, forces at work,

Von Braun was sending a clear message that he would credit people for admitting mistakes instead of concealing the truth. With this powerful symbolic gesture, he helped create a culture of openness about mistakes rather than one of politics and self-protection, thereby also building a culture of continuous learning.

The historian Ian Kershaw has said: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but was paved with indifference.

Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” —WERNHER VON BRAUN

Von Braun, the boy wonder of Germany’s V-2 rocket program, was typical of the changing fortunes experienced by the Nazi scientists. At the close of the war, he was classified as a “potential security risk” because of his deep ties to Hitler and to the Nazi Party as a decorated officer. Within months, however, his hiring as a rocket scientist was suddenly reclassified as vital to America’s national security.

The most famous of these scientists was Wernher von Braun.

American viewers saw none of this. They saw only the pictures of the smiling, photogenic von Braun posing with Walt Disney next to one of his rocket prototypes, not the grainy wartime images of him in a Nazi officer’s uniform with a swastika on his arm. After

These were not state secrets, even in the 1950s and 1960s. Articles and books in Europe were already beginning to tell the story of how von Braun had used many thousands of slave laborers to build the V-2, and von Braun himself practically gloated about it in an interview with the New Yorker just six years after coming to America.

Talented, creative engineers and scientists are essential for any program that is attempting to make fundamental technological breakthroughs, but those relatively rare skills are common in comparison to the few who have both superior technical talent and the ability to manage, lead, and inspire large, complex organizations.

Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” ~Wenher von Braun

The entire WS-315A program was deployed, in England and Italy, in large numbers during the Cold War. What is most interesting is that two weeks after we won the Air Force contract to design for the DM-18 against the Army’s Missile Development Center at Huntsville, Alabama (headed by Dr. Von Braun, the senior concept designer of the German V2 missile) we also won the contract to build the whole system to deploy

I’m convinced that none of the important achievements in human history were accomplished before ten-thirty or eleven in the morning!”17

While most of the men felt patriotic and even nationalistic attachment to Germany, their motives centered mostly on being able to finally obtain the funding needed to create the rockets all of them dreamed of, as von Braun once explained: “There has been a lot of talk that the Raketenflugplatz finally ‘sold out to the Nazis.’ In 1932, however, when the die was cast, the Nazis were not yet in power, and to all of us Hitler was just another mountebank on the political stage. Our feelings toward the Army resembled those of the early aviation pioneers [...] The issue in these discussions was merely how the golden cow could be milked most successfully.” (Neufeld, 1995, 26).

In 1940, Heinrich Himmler, wanting to extend SS influence to the rocket program, pressured Wernher von Braun into joining the organization despite his lack of political commitment. Von Braun joined chiefly to keep working on his passion, rocketry, but his eventual rise to the rank of Sturmbannführer (major) tainted his reputation and dogged him following the war. A few years later, Arthur Rudolph and several other leading Peenemünde figures began using slave labor at the facility in 1942. Contrary to their later claims that Himmler forced this move on them, their letters and memos at the time indicate nothing but enthusiasm among this group's members for the use of Soviet, Polish, and French POWs for coerced labor.

The Soviets, knowing that the Americans would permit the German scientists to leave if they wished to, attempted to take advantage of the much more liberal U.S. attitude towards the Third Reich's inventors and engineers. During the interrogation of these individuals at sites in Germany and in Paris during summer 1945, the various Allies naturally had the right to send their own representatives to the interviews, so the Soviet interrogators approached the German scientists with smoothly plausible claims, offering them considerable rewards and promising they could conduct their research in Germany. Von Braun and most of the other scientists politely declined these offers, knowing them to be outright lies and fearing what the Soviets would do if they voluntarily joined those of their peers already captured by the Red Army.

strength than he can muster, he needs faith in God.” Years before anyone would accept the idea of a man travelling to the moon and back, Dr. von Braun was asked, “What would it take to make a rocket to reach the moon.” He replied simply, “The will to do it.” von Braun was, clearly, a brilliant man who possessed a great understanding of life and a tremendous awareness of the laws of the universe. In fact, he is considered, by many experts in the field, to be the “Father” of the space program. Like all great achievers, he had gained a profound insight into the “spiritual” laws of life, and one of those laws is the Law of Attraction. This is the law I would like to delve into now. Indeed, an understanding of this particular law is actually the key to understanding this entire book. The reason this is so, is that “The Law of Attraction” is the underlying principle which governs the level of your personal prosperity. However

In recognition of his accomplishments, von Braun was publicly congratulated by President John F. Kennedy, whose older brother, Joseph Jr., had died while on a 1944 bombing mission against a doodlebug launch site in France.

being the son of Michael Rockefeller, while also being the great grandson of Nazi Eva Von Braun and Adolf Hitler.

Braun trägt Rollkragenpulli, mal wieder, wie Steve Jobs. Doch Braun ist heute kein Steve Jobs, keine Lichtgestalt und kein Guru. Er ist Markus Braun, Gescheiterter und Gejagter.

Because von Braun was a public figure, his Nazi past was always there, but in shadow. By the 1960s, it was sometimes treated as a joke. One night, before an Apollo mission, von Braun stormed out of a press conference after a reporter asked him if he could guarantee that the rocket would not hit London.

Like Von Braun in the 1950s, all was forgiven for the sake of space exploration.

It was very successful, but it fell on the wrong planet.

Halte mir die Fliegen fern, und du sollst mein Sohn und Erbe sein!

Yet Götterdämmerung is no apocalypse: it envisions a transfer of power, from gods to people. It is also the redress of a wrong, restoring the Ring from the illusory heights to the truthful depths. Wotan, very unlike Hitler, has repented of his megalomania: "I longed in my heart for power ... I acted unfairly… I did not return the ring to the Rhine... The curse that I fed will not flee from me now." The conductor Christoph von Dohnányi, whose father, Hans, was part of the anti-Nazi resistance, once told me: "When I really think about Wagner, I don't discover anything that had to lead to Hitler. And what happens here"—we were looking at the score of Walkure, at Wotan's cries of shame—"is not something that any fascist could have written. Because it is not simplifying. It is a 'giving up' thing. Wagner abused power but hated the state." "Götterdämmerung" is the wrong word for the scenes that unfolded in Berlin during the war's last days: the double suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun, the suicides of Josef and Magda Goebbels, the murder of the Goebbels children, the killing of Hitler's dogs.

Von Braun told Rosin that there would be a succession of “enemies.” “First it will be the communists, then it will be the terrorists, and after that it will be the extraterrestrials.”5 As the succession of “enemies” appears to be coming on stage exactly as planned, I should like to examine each one in somewhat greater depth than I have done before.

And yet in less than a year Arthur Rudolph, Georg Rickhey, Wernher von Braun, Major General Walter Dornberger, and other rocket engineers would secretly be heading to America to work. In the last days of World War II few would ever have believed such a thing.

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. military set up an agency called the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, whose mandate was to implement Operation Paperclip, a program in which U.S. military and spies fanned out across Europe, seeking German scientists and engineers to bring home to America. Even before the war with Germany had ended, the Cold War was in full swing, and the U.S. government was desperate not just to obtain the knowledge these men held, but to keep their ideas, research, and abilities out of the hands of the Soviets. President Truman was adamant that no actual Nazis be brought back to the States, but the generals and spies ignored this edict from their ostensible commander-in-chief. When confronted with Nazi war criminals like the infamous Wernher von Braun—inventor of the German V-2 rocket and dedicated exploiter of slave labor, who was personally responsible for flogging and torturing people, and whose program resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands—the army and intelligence services whitewashed records, expunged files, and erased evidence of Nazi Party membership. They not only brought the most evil of criminals back to the United States, but gave them the highest of security clearances.

Always use the word "impossible" with the greatest of caution.

Besides convincing readers of The Mars Project that such an undertaking was possible, it also attracted a major magazine to do a splashy series of articles based on von Braun's ideas, and brought him to the attention of Walt Disney, who engaged von Braun to work with his studio on a series of extremely popular TV shows and educational films about spaceflight (see chapter 6).