Breaking the Chains of Gravity

by Amy Shira Teitel

  Developments in combat aircraft had not won World War I for Germany. The conflict left the country devastated, and the Treaty of Versailles, which had enforced the war’s end, had left the German military in ruins. In an attempt to prevent the vanquished nation from rearming itself and instigating a new conflict, the treaty stipulated that the German Army be limited to seven divisions of infantry and three divisions of cavalry, totaling four thousand men with no more than three hundred in leadership positions. The German air force was restricted even further. The treaty ordered all flying personnel demobilized and limited the future air force to a thousand men. Completed airplanes and seaplanes; dirigibles and other lighter-than-air vehicles; all vehicles under construction; and all the supporting infrastructure, including plants manufacturing the lifting gas hydrogen, airplane parts, and all munitions were forcibly surrendered to the governments of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. The Treaty of Versailles failed to address rockets simply because they had not been used offensively in the First World War. Though forcing Germany’s air force into submission severely weakened the nation’s overall military strength, the omission of rockets opened a loophole. The German military could revisit this technology, rearming itself and developing a long-range bombardment capability, without blatantly violating the terms of the cease-fire.

  It was with this intention in mind that Becker, von Horstig, and Dornberger arrived at the Raketenflugplatz that spring day, though they had been invited by Rudolf Nebel. In seeking a source of funding for the VfR, Nebel had hand delivered a copy of his technical treatise “Confidential Memo on Long-Range Rocket Artillery” to Becker. It wasn’t a scientifically perfect paper, but the concepts were sufficiently well developed and intriguing that Becker was moved to take a trip to the outskirts of Berlin to see what these young men were working on.

  There were two simple rockets undergoing testing at the Raketenflugplatz that day, the Mirak 1 and the Mirak 2. The moniker Mirak was an abbreviation of minimumrakete, meaning “simple rocket.” The Mirak 1 looked like a firecracker. It had a simple copper rocket engine, a smaller version of Oberth’s Kegeldüse engine, housed inside a cylindrical fuselage, nestled behind the bullet-shaped cover with a long aluminum tube that trailed behind it as a guiding stick. Though this was the rocket ready for a launch, the army delegates were more interested in the larger and more sophisticated Mirak 2. Without one to launch, the VfR displayed their instrumentation and data from earlier tests of the advanced rocket before demonstrating its engine’s power with a static fire test.

  The army representatives weren’t impressed with the VfR. To men used to military precision, the group’s poor record keeping and a lackluster engine test gave the impression that the VfR’s greatest accomplishments lay in flashy shows of explosives. But Becker could see there was talent in the group and offered the VfR a chance to build an advanced rocket with the army’s sponsorship and launch it from the military site at Kummersdorf West, some seventeen miles from Berlin. A successful launch, hinted Becker, could lead to the army becoming a benefactor for the VfR.

  Months passed while the VfR worked on their new rocket, and at the end of July it was ready to launch. Early one morning before sunrise, two cars drove out of the Raketenflugplatz on their way to Kummersdorf West. The first car carried the rocket, a one-stick Repulsor modified from the original design to meet the army’s specifications. The second car carried liquid oxygen, gasoline, and all the tools needed to erect and launch the rocket. Also in the cars were the men who would have the honor of launching the morning’s test: von Braun, Nebel, and Riedel. Dornberger joined the men as a representative of the army.

  The sophistication of Kummersdorf West awed the VfR pioneers. They had never seen so much measuring equipment in one place, everything from cameras to precision timekeepers like chronographs and optical tracking instruments like phototheodolites. These were the tools that could gather exact data on their rocket, presuming it took flight. The men set to work preparing their Repulsor for launch, and by two o’clock that afternoon everything was ready to go. At the signal, the rocket leaped into the air, rising about one hundred feet before tipping over horizontally on a flight path that sent it crashing into the forest. Worse still, they hadn’t managed to capture any data. There would be no money from the army to fund the VfR’s ongoing work. But while the rocket failed to impress the German Army, Wernher von Braun did leave a mark on Dornberger. Engaging the young, fair-haired engineer in conversation about past and future tests and technologies, Dornberger was struck by von Braun’s shrewdness and technical knowledge of rocketry. Von Braun, he could tell, held great promise for the world of rocketry.

  Dornberger might have added determination to the list of von Braun’s appealing qualities. Unwilling to let the Repulsor’s failure at Kummersdorf West be the end of a potential partnership between the army and the VfR, von Braun went to Colonel Becker on his own with what little data he had from the VfR’s Raketenflugplatz tests in hand. Becker was impressed, not only with the information von Braun presented but with his audacity and confidence as well. Both men knew a partnership would be beneficial, Becker getting a weapon and von Braun getting the necessary funding to build the rockets of his boyhood dreams. So Becker offered von Braun a deal where the army would become a benefactor of the VfR. Von Braun was thrilled, but not everyone at the Raketenflugplatz shared his enthusiasm. Some wanted nothing to do with the military because of the restrictions this partnership would force upon their work; they wanted to build exploratory rockets, not missiles. Other members were personally wary of forging a partnership with the military lest a conflict break out and force them into the war machine.

  The VfR’s overall trepidation didn’t dampen Becker’s interest, and so he made von Braun a second offer: a job developing liquid rockets for the army and a doctorate degree. Colonel Becker was also a professor at the University of Berlin. He could arrange for von Braun’s army work reports to be accepted as a thesis, though the material would be confidential. Von Braun accepted and, at just twenty years old, was formally hired by Dornberger and began working for the army on October 1, 1932. The military’s poaching of the brightest minds marked the end of amateur rocketry in Germany and the beginning of the rocket’s revival as a weapon.

  Dornberger recruited other members of the VfR to gradually fill out the ranks of his new liquid-propulsion rocket program, among them Arthur Rudolph and Walter Riedel. With better equipment and facilities at Kummersdorf West, the former VfR engineers stumbled through new rocket designs, trial and error serving as their greatest teachers.

  Von Braun’s first test for the army came just two months after he was hired. December 21 was a clear, cold night at Kummersdorf West as he, Riedel, Dornberger, and another technician named Heinrich Grunow made their way to an outdoor test stand. Three concrete slabs eighteen feet long and twelve feet high formed an open enclosure that could be closed with a set of folding metal doors. The roof made of wooden slats covered in tar paper was rolled back for the test. Inside the test space that night was the first rocket motor von Braun developed under Dornberger’s leadership, a twenty-inch-long pear-shaped engine made of an aluminum alloy called duralumin designed to generate 650 pounds of thrust. Pipes and wires led from the test setup into the control room on the other side of one wall, offering technicians Riedel and Grunow protection from the engine test as they fed fuel and oxidizer into the combustion chamber. Dornberger, meanwhile, took shelter behind a tree.

  Once the chamber was filled, von Braun, as the junior member on the team, manually introduced the flame to start the combustion reaction. He carefully picked up a can of flaming gasoline with a twelve-foot-long pole and nudged it into the path of the alcohol and liquid oxygen issuing from the engine’s nozzle. In an instant the test stand was engulfed in flames as an explosion ripped the folded doors from their hinges and sent hot metal flying in all directions. The fire died to reveal a mess of charred metal and wires smoldering with thick, noxious smoke. Rie
del and Grunow emerged from the control room to find von Braun and Dornberger miraculously unscathed. The culprit turned out to be delayed ignition. In the seconds before von Braun had pushed the gasoline under the engine, enough alcohol and liquid oxygen had built up in the combustion chamber to create an explosive environment. A new lesson was learned, and work continued at Kummersdorf West. A month later the propulsion demonstrations resumed in the rebuilt test stand.

  As 1933 wore on, Dornberger’s team began building on their early concept rockets to develop their first product specifically for the army. Called the Aggregate-1, or A-1, it marked a significant shift now for the former VfR engineers. At the Raketenflugplatz, the team had designed their rockets with the engine mounted in the rocket’s nose with the fuel tanks behind it, not unlike an automobile. For the A-1, they mounted the engine in the rear, below the fuel and oxidizer tanks when the rocket was standing vertically. As rockets became bigger, this simple redesign promised to prevent the rocket’s exhaust from incinerating the tanks. Rather than a firecracker, the A-1 resembled a huge artillery shell one foot in diameter and 4.6 feet long. The team also placed an eighty-five-pound flywheel, an instrument that increased the rocket’s momentum to make it more stable in flight, in the rocket’s nose.

  Problems with this new arrangement gradually came to light as testing revealed the design was nose heavy. Its center of gravity was too far from its center of thrust to be stable, even with a gyroscope mounted in the nose. Problems aside, following a series of static fire tests toward the end of 1933, Dornberger’s team opted to launch the A-1 anyway. If it failed, as they expected it would, at least they would learn something in the process. The rocket was loaded onto a launch stand, the fuel and oxidizer started flowing, and the ignition lit. In a flash the rocket exploded in a massive fireball, leaving behind a pile of twisted metal. It was the same problem of delayed ignition; an excess amount of pressurized fuel and liquid oxygen had built up in the combustion chamber a fraction of a second before the engines were lit, leading to an explosion.

  As 1934 dawned, Dornberger’s team took the lessons learned from the disastrous A-1 and set to developing their follow-up rocket, the A-2. This rocket had the same dimensions, shape, and engine as its predecessor, but the placement of its instruments was different. In the A-2, the gyroscope was placed in the center of the rocket’s body rather than the nose, something the men hoped would solve the stability problems of the A-1. Two identical A-2s named Max and Moritz (after two popular cartoon characters) were built by the end of 1934.

  While the group at Kummersdorf was busy bringing the A-2 to life, the Raketenflugplatz died, killed not by an exploding rocket but by a water bill. With unused buildings falling into disrepair, leaking pipes and faucets became a problem. And while the rent of ten marks a year remained affordable, the water bill from the constantly running taps was crippling. The VfR was forced to relinquish the site to the city of Berlin, and without a space to work the society was all but dead. Amateur rocketry couldn’t survive, leaving Dornberger’s group at Kummersdorf West as the lone functional rocket group in Germany.

  The shift in the landscape of rocketry was nothing compared to the changes taking place in Germany. On August 2, 1934, German president Paul von Hindenburg, the final vestige of the Weimar Republic, had died in office of lung cancer. Immediately afterward, the Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich was made public, rolling the offices of president and chancellor into one, a single office of der Führer (the leader). The effect was that Chancellor Adolf Hitler was pronounced Führer without a formal election. By extension the National Socialist German Workers’ Party seized power and control of the country’s assets, including its military. Dornberger’s group was now, however indirectly, in the hands of the new national party.

  But the changing political landscape did nothing to change the day-to-day workings at Kummersdorf. The year 1934 was devoted to Max and Moritz, both of which were launched successfully from a site on Borkum Island in the North Sea a few days before Christmas. The updated engine and new gyroscope configuration were steps toward a properly functioning missile. The reward for this first significant positive result was an influx of army funding for the group to build the next rocket in the series, the A-3. The twin rockets also brought the rocket group to the attention of Germany’s meager remaining air force, the Luftwaffe.

  That Germany had an air force at all was a poorly kept secret at best. In the early 1930s, Hermann Göring, the minister of aviation, disguised programs to train military pilots as recreational flight training under the League of Air Sports. But by 1935, the ruse was dropped and the Luftwaffe was formally established, an unmistakable military creation of the Nazi regime. And the new Luftwaffe was very interested in the liquid-propulsion engines the army was working on, not for rockets but for rocket-powered airplanes. Major Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of the famous “Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen, visited the Kummersdorf team to request that they develop an alcohol and liquid oxygen engine for an airplane, one that would serve as a secondary engine to a traditional propeller propulsion system. Von Richthofen went so far as to request that a team of his own men move into Kummersdorf West to develop a rocket engine that could power an airplane, a request the army’s group obliged. Impressed by the Kummersdorf group’s early successes, the Luftwaffe was excited by the prospect of engines that could get heavy bombers into the air and turn small fighter planes into formidable flying weapons, easily outstripping enemy aircraft.

  As von Richthofen’s plans advanced in the summer of 1935, Wernher von Braun found himself one day sitting in the wingless fuselage of a Junkers airplane bolted firmly to a test stand. Mounted behind him was a rocket engine, the same 650-pound thrust engine that had powered the twin A-2 rockets Max and Moritz. Von Braun threw a switch in the cockpit to fire the engine, and a spear of flame shot out behind the plane. The flame erupted with enough force that, even without wings on the fuselage, von Braun would have shot forward into the air. Even this static test exhilarated von Braun. He had just experienced firsthand the power of his rockets as a means for travel, and it had whetted his appetite for more powerful rocket travel.

  Between the new contract developing rocket engines for the Luftwaffe and ongoing work on the A-3 to deliver a functional offensive rocket to the army, Dornberger’s team was fast outgrowing the facilities at Kummersdorf. The suburban location was also becoming a problem; increased activity made it harder to maintain the necessary military levels of secrecy at a site just seventeen miles outside of Berlin. It was clear they needed a new location, somewhere isolated where they could set up larger test stands and a firing range to safely launch increasingly large missiles. It also made sense to merge the army and the Luftwaffe’s rocket programs into one site to avoid unnecessary duplication.

  The search for the perfect test site began in the summer of 1935, and the solution came through the von Brauns. As a child, Wernher von Braun had gone on family hunting trips to the northern German island of Usedom, a quiet, secluded island bordered on one side by the Baltic Sea and separated from the mainland by the Peene River. On the northwestern edge of Usedom was a village called Peenemünde, which literally means “mouth of the Peene,” and marked the spot where the Peene flows into the Baltic. The isolation made it perfect for a discreet arms development site, and its coastal location was perfect for a safe firing range; rockets could fly safely over unpopulated areas and land harmlessly in the water.

  In the spring of 1936, the German Air Ministry negotiated the sale of a tract of land 2.5 by 7.5 miles near Peenemünde for 750,000 marks, a paltry sum compared to the funding set aside to develop the site. Already cleared to build a new facility for the army, Colonel Becker teamed up with Dornberger, von Braun, and von Richthofen to present their idea of using Peenemünde to General Albert Kesselring, the Luftwaffe’s chief of aircraft construction. They quickly sold him on the plan for a joint facility, which led to discussions of funding. Von Richthofen immediately
put up five million marks for the Luftwaffe’s contribution. Not to be outdone, Becker put in six million marks for the army’s allowance for the new rocket facility. Construction began at Peenemünde almost immediately, and while it marked the beginning of a collaborative effort between the army and the Luftwaffe, the latter made another acquisition at the same time that spoke to its separate plans for rocket engine development.

  Though published and working in Germany, Hermann Oberth’s influence had spread beyond his adopted homeland. Like Valier and von Braun, Austrian-born engineer Eugen Sänger had been inspired by the possibilities of using rockets for spaceflight after reading Hermann Oberth’s works on the subject. And like his inspiration, Sänger’s own doctoral dissertation on rocket propulsion at the Technical University in Vienna was rejected in 1931 on the grounds that it was too fantastic to be plausible. Also like Oberth, rejection hadn’t pushed Sänger out of academia or away from rocketry. By the mid-1930s, he had secured a position as a professor at his alma mater and had a preliminary spacecraft design under development. Sänger imagined a future where commercial flights would carry passengers and cargo through the upper stratosphere to reach any point on the globe within an hour of launching. And so he designed a system he believed might bring this future to pass.