The Eagle Has Landed: The Story of Apollo 11 Read Online Free PDF Page A

1949, the German scientists and technicians were loaded on a bus and taken across the Mexican border at El Paso. The bus immediately turned around and came back through the border patrol station, where the Germans were issued entrance visas, which could then be used to apply for American citizenship.
    The influx of German ingenuity was not limited to the rocket scientists at Fort Bliss. After the conclusion of World War II, the U.S. military relocated nearly 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians to America.
    The White Sands Proving Ground (an annex of the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland), located 40 miles northeast of Fort Bliss, near Los Cruces, New Mexico, served as the launch site for the captured V-2 rockets. In the isolated desert of the Tularosa Basin, von Braun’ rocket team merged with Project Hermes, a guided missile program the Army Ordnance Department had previously contracted to General Electric in 1944, as an answer to Germany’s V-2 program.
    On April 16, 1946, the first V-2 rocket was fired at White Sands. From that date through September 19, 1952, 67 V-2s were launched into the New Mexico skies. Instead of explosive pay-loads, the missiles carried cameras, Geiger counters, and other scientific equipment in their noses. Mice and Rhesus monkeys were also sent aloft to monitor potential health risks of high speed travel at unprecedented altitudes. On July 30, 1946, a V-2 rocket reached the heretofore unimaginable altitude of 100 miles. That same year, another V-2 became the first launch vehicle to detect the ozone layer.
    A budget-conscious post-World War II Congress was reluctant to appropriate meaningful funding for rocket research and development, and the German scientists earned a starting pay of only $144.00 per month. Werner von Braun, himself, was paid $9,500.00 per year, with a $6.00 per diem while traveling. Dedicated to their dream of space exploration, the majority of the rocketeers turned down higher paying private-sector jobs and chose to remain as civil service employees.
    In 1946, Lieutenant Colonel William E. Winterstern, custodian of the German rocket scientists, posed a far-sighted question to von Braun: “If we could give you all the money you wanted, how long would you need to get man to the Moon and bring him back?” The rocket scientist, who was then a largely unknown figure, asked for some time to contemplate Winterstern’s expansive inquiry. Several weeks later, von Braun offered his answer: “Give us three billion dollars and ten years, and well go to the Moon and back.”
    As the United States established a fledgling missile program, the Soviet Union was busy developing and testing its own rockets. Like Wernher von Braun, Russian-born Sergei Korolev was a visionary, who had established the Group for Investigation of Reactive Motion during the 1930s. Korolev, commissioned as a Colonel in the Red Army, traveled to Germany shortly after the end of World War II and supervised the conscription of 150 rocket scientists and technicians. Unlike the United States, which allowed its German immigrants to take an active role in rocket research and development, the Soviets merely learned from their conscripts, before eventually sending them back home. Having salvaged but a handful of V-2s, Soviet scientists utilized German ideas and Russian know-how to develop the next generation of missiles. Korolev would eventually become recognized as the Chief Designer of the Soviet missile and space programs.
    Having few allies outside its natural boundaries, the Soviet Union did not have available air fields from which to launch nuclear-armed bomber attacks against the United States. To counter the superior American nuclear bomber force, the Soviets decided to develop nuclear missiles as a deterrent.
    With the outbreak of the Korean War in June of 1950, American defense spending, which had been significantly curtailed in the years following World War II, dramatically rebounded.