Von Braun got rocket for center

[Spanky]

Von Braun got rocket for center, Buckbee recalls

Monday, October 09, 2006
By SHELBY G. SPIRES
Times Aerospace Writer [email protected]

Ex-director tells of plan to bring parts here from all over

Dr. Wernher von Braun faced a giant task in the late 1960s with the Saturn V, but it wasn't with the rocket that was going to loft Americans to the moon. The challenge was how to bring one to Huntsville.

Von Braun wanted to build a museum outside the gates of Redstone Arsenal, where the U.S. Space & Rocket Center stands today, and the German rocket genius knew it would need a main attraction, Ed Buckbee said during a Space History presentation at the Tom Bevill Conference Center and Hotel.

Buckbee was a NASA public relations specialist at Marshall Space Flight Center from 1961-68, serving under von Braun during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. After that, he was chosen by von Braun in 1968 to direct the planning and development of the Space & Rocket Center and was its first director, serving from 1970 to his retirement in 1994.

It was around early 1969, Buckbee said, and von Braun wanted a moon rocket - the Saturn V - to attract people to North Alabama and the museum. There weren't any extra launch vehicles to put on display at a time before NASA had put a man on the moon. But von Braun knew the Saturn V test models, which had been used as design tools for the lunar rocket program, were not in use.

Von Braun held a meeting with key Marshall Space Flight Center managers and put the challenge to them.

"Well, these parts and stages were spread out all over the nation," Buckbee told a crowd of about 200 people at the Bevill Center. "And the people in that meeting said they were going to have to write facility directors and managers, and it was going to take time - at least six months or more."

After the meeting, von Braun huddled with a few key Marshall managers, Buckbee said, "and told them they were going to start a training program on how to move the Saturn V stages, and that Saturn transportation program would move the key test pieces back from California and Mississippi or wherever they might be. That's how they all got back to Huntsville.

"And he told them. 'We are not going to ask permission to do this, but we'll just ask forgiveness when it is all over.' "

Today, that rocket, on its side at the Space & Rocket Center, is being restored to be moved into a new facility.

Many who knew him claim von Braun had an infectious personality that made people want to work "14 hours a day," Buckbee said.

That personality allowed him to mix with schoolchildren, reporters and leaders from around the world and win them over to the dream of placing people in space and on other planets.

The Marshall director certainly hit it off with President John F. Kennedy during the latter's visit to the NASA center in 1963, Buckbee said.

"We had set up an engine test for (Kennedy) to watch, and when it was through he had that amazed look of awe most people had when they saw a Saturn test," Buckbee said.

Buckbee feels a major reason the American space program was supported by Kennedy is that von Braun and the president "had such great chemistry together."

After his visit here, Kennedy asked von Braun to ride on Air Force One to Cape Canaveral so they could further discuss the space program, Buckbee said.

"That took some of the people at the Cape back," he said. "Here was von Braun rubbing shoulders with the president and sitting in on their briefings and being asked to comment on them."

Goal was Mars trip

Von Braun's team at Marshall, along with teams at other NASA facilities in the 1960s, put together the mighty Saturn rockets which helped land a man on the moon July 20, 1969.

But von Braun wanted to go on to Mars. The moon was just a starting place.

He left Marshall in 1970 and took a space agency job in Washington crafting a NASA headquarters guide to reach Mars. The plan was to use two modified Saturn V's with nuclear-powered third stages and link those in orbit around the Earth, Buckbee said, "and that would've took six astronauts to Mars and back ... but nobody was listening in Congress or the public or even NASA really. It just didn't fit in with anybody's plans."

Von Braun left NASA in June 1972 and settled for a time as an aerospace executive at Fairchild Industries, helping start a satellite program there.

Last contribution to city

In 1975, he had one last contribution to Huntsville, Buckbee said.

"He would check in on me from time to time," said Buckbee, who was the Space & Rocket Center's first director. "He would come by and give me five or six really good ideas about things to do."

Von Braun watched the schoolchildren taking the center tour and asked Buckbee what they wanted to do at the center but could not.

"I told him they wanted to get inside one of the spacecraft we had on display and flip the switches and play inside a rocket," Buckbee said.

Von Braun told Buckbee that America has all sorts of camps for students, so "why not a science camp where they can learn about rocketry and science?" he asked.

"That's where Space Camp was born," Buckbee said. "Today it has graduated more than 500,000 students, but it was von Braun's idea."

Wernher von Braun died of cancer June 16, 1977, and is buried in Alexandria, Va.

"He was a unique guy," Buckbee said. "He's the man who made this town the Rocket City."

[ApolloXI]

I can't remember the main curator's name was but she told us that the Smithsonian and USSRC have some problems with each other. One thing the Smith and USSRC fight about Von Braun’s papers from when he was in Germany and working for NASA. In Von Braun’s will he wanted the USSRC to have all of his paper to go to the USRRC but since the Smith. had an agreement with NASA that most objects that are not being used would go to the Smith. but I think the courts said the documents where still Von Braun’s so it went to the USSRC. One of the reasons the USSRC has things from the Smith is that NASA pressured them and plus the Smith only has so much room.