

Wernher von Braun was born on 23 March 1912, in the small town of Wirsitz in the Province of Posen, Kingdom of Prussia, then German Empire and now Poland. Von Braun is widely seen as the "father of space travel", the "father of rocket science" or the "father of the American lunar program". In 1967, von Braun was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science. In 1960, his group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in the US and beyond between 19. He worked for the United States Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the United States' first space satellite Explorer 1 in 1958.

Following the war, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip.

The V-2 became the first artificial object to travel into space on 20 June 1944. He helped design and co-developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during World War II. Īs a young man, von Braun worked in Nazi Germany's rocket development program. He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, as well as the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun ( US: / ˌ v ɜːr n ər v ɒ n ˈ b r aʊ n/ VUR-nər von BROWN, German: 23 March 1912 – 16 June 1977) was a German and American aerospace engineer and space architect.
