His crowning achievement was the development of the Saturn V rocket that enabled human beings to reach the moon’s surface in 1969. Apollo Space Program Director Sam Phillips once said America would not have reached the moon as quickly as it did without his help.

If a list were to be compiled of young people who were fired by the dream of space exploration just by reading the science fiction stories of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, the name of Wernher von Braun would feature prominently. Born in Wirsitz, Germany (now Wyrzysk, Poland), on March 23, 1912, von Braun was also captivated by the studies of Hermann Oberth, a German physicist and engineer, who was considered to be one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. As a teenager, von Braun was keenly interested in spaceflight, becoming closely involved in the German rocket society, Verein fur Raumschiffarht. Later, he became one of the most important rocket developers and champions of space exploration ever. His crowning achievement was the development of the gigantic Saturn V rocket that enabled the first human beings to reach the moon’s surface in 1969.

In 1932, Wernher von Braun went to work for the German Army to develop ballistic missiles. In 1934, he led a group that successfully launched two liquid-fuel rockets more than 2.5 km aloft. After World War II broke out, von Braun and his team operated from a secret laboratory at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. They produced the famous V-2 rocket—a liquid propellant missile 46 feet long and weighing 27,000 pounds. It could fly at over 5,600 kmph and deliver a 2,200-pound warhead to a target 800 km away. It was the precursor of much larger rockets later used by the United States and the Soviet Union.

In the closing stages of the war, von Braun and 500 of his top scientists surrendered to the Americans, along with detailed rocket blueprints and test equipment. They were received with open arms. For the next 15 years, von Braun’s 120-man team worked with the US Army in the development of ballistic missiles. In 1950, at the missile proving grounds in White Sands, New Mexico, they built the Army’s Redstone tactical ballistic missile. The team also developed the Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) and the Pershing missile.

The intensifying space race with the Soviet Union created an urgent need for von Braun’s expertise. The 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 greatly alarmed the American public who felt that their country had fallen way behind the Soviets. The US Government tasked von Braun to create an orbital launch vehicle—something he had volunteered to do in 1954, but had been rebuffed. In the event, his Jupiter-C successfully launched America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958, signalling the birth of the US space programme. In 1960, von Braun became the Director of the newly established NASA Marshall Space Flight Centre. The centre’s first major programme was the development of the Saturn multi-stage liquid-fuel launch vehicle to carry heavy payloads into and beyond earth’s orbit. From this emerged the Apollo programme for manned lunar flights. Wernher von Braun initially favoured a flight engineering concept that involved an earth orbit rendezvous technique (the same method he had proposed for building a space station). However, in 1962, he switched to the more risky lunar orbit rendezvous concept that was subsequently validated. His dream became a reality when a Saturn V rocket launched Apollo 11 on a historic mission that saw the first two humans set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. Over the next three years, Saturn V rockets enabled six pairs of American astronauts to tread the surface of the moon. In all, NASA launched 13 Saturn V boosters, with no loss of crew or payload. It remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful space rocket ever made operational, and still holds the record for the heaviest launch vehicle payload.