When he returned to Germany at the age of seventeen, he entered the Institute of Technology in Berlin. He also became a member of the German Rocket Society, a group of young men dedicated to the task of developing rockets for interplanetary travel.

During 1931 von Braun went to the Institute of Technology in Zurich to continue his studies. He also continued his research on rockets. He returned to Berlin in 1932 to study for his doctorate which he received two years later. Although he was only twenty, he was elected president of the Rocket Society, but the Society at that time was in decline. It needed money with which to work.

Then, secretly one of its members wrote to the German Army Command asking for financial aid and suggesting that the rocket might be an important weapon. Already interested in rockets because the Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Germany to manufacture heavy artillery, the Army Command answered the Society’s plea for help. In fact, von Braun, still only twenty, was made technical director on liquid-propelled rocket research at the experimental station at Kummersdorf. This was the beginning of the V2 guided missile.

When Hitler came to power, the Rocket Society collapsed. All records and equipment were taken over by his Gestapo. However, von Braun continued to work on the projectiles A1 (Aggregate 1), A2, A3, A, and A5. When the A5 was successfully launched in 1938, it reached a height of five miles and almost the speed of sound.

In 1940 Hitler struck rockets off the priority list because he thought they could not be aimed accurately. Then on October 3, 192, the A4, having been slowed down in production, was launched. It reached a height of sixty miles—by far the greatest height ever reached—and covered a distance of 120 miles. Its maximum speed was 3,300 miles per hour. Hitler admitted his mistake.

But in March of 1944, after having done research on the much bigger A9 and A10, von Braun and two engineers were arrested by the Gestapo on charges of sabotage. Von Braun had been heard to say that he had never intended to build a weapon of war and had only worked on the A4 rocket under pressure.

Soon afterward the Allies conquered Germany and World War II ended. Von Braun and one hundred scientists and technicians were taken to the American rocket proving grounds at White Sands, New Mexico, in what was known as “Operation Paperclip.” Captured V2 equipment accompanied them.

In 1946 von Braun accepted an offer to become an American citizen. The next year he returned to Germany to marry his seventeen-year-old cousin Maria, and in 1950, after taking his first citizenship papers, was appointed technical director of the U.S. Guided Missiles Development Division.

Von Braun continues to work and dream of interplanetary travel. His recent work, The Mars Project, describes how Mars can be reached. He firmly believes that once man can see earth from the vantage point of an out-station and as a planet against all infinity, war will be banished and “humanity will enter the Cosmic Age.”