 Werner von Braun is one of the most recognizable figures in the history of spaceflight, but for those who don't recognize the name, who was Werner von Braun? Werner von Braun was born on March 23rd, 1912, into a family with Junkers Heritage, a noble social class that traditionally dominated the Prussian military officer corps, the land-owning elite, and the offices of civil service. It was a heritage that was somewhat at odds with von Braun's love of spaceflight that he cultivated beginning at the age of 13 when his mother gave him a telescope for his birthday. Looking up at the night sky, von Braun imagined exploring the planets and stars, and possibly of building a rocket large enough to send men to the moon. Von Braun fixated specifically on the rocket that would enable man's foray into space. Towards the end of high school, he got his first hands-on experience with rockets when he joined the Werein für Raumschiffhaut, an amateur rocket society based in Berlin. It wasn't long before the German Army took notice of this amateur rocket society's activities, and of von Braun in particular. And von Braun, in turn, took notice of the Army, namely the Army's money. He knew that to get his rockets off the ground, he would need military funding. It turned out to be a happy partnership. In 1932, when von Braun was only 20 years old, he had the German Army backing his own research into rocketry. During the Second World War and on the Army's dime, Werner von Braun led the team that developed the V2 rocket, the same rocket that the Nazis launched on London in the closing months of the war. But the V2s using combat weren't built at the research site in Panamunda. They were built by concentration camp prisoners in underground factories near the German town of Nordhausen. His rocket's association with slave labor put von Braun in a tricky situation once the war ended. He was a technical genius guilty of war crimes. Eager to continue working on the rockets that would enable man's foray into space and equally keen to avoid death, von Braun led his rocket team into safety by finding and surrendering to American soldiers. Under Operation Overcast and Project Paperclip, most of von Braun's team was imported into America, along with recovered V2s and supporting documentation and hardware. What was supposed to be a short-term arrangement turned into a permanent situation. Most of the scientists became naturalized Americans, including von Braun, beginning their American tenure by launching V2s from a test site in White Sands, New Mexico. In the early 1950s, von Braun brought his vision of a future with manned spaceflight to the American public first through the pages of Collier's magazine and then as part of Walt Disney's Tomorrowland TV special. He brought his vision a step closer to reality when he started building rockets for the US Army. His Jupiter rocket launched the Explorer I satellite into orbit on February 1st, 1958. His Redstone rocket launched the first suborbital manned missions of NASA's Mercury spaceflight program. NASA finally absorbed von Braun and his Army group of rocketeers in 1960 and under the umbrella of the space agency he created his most notable achievement, the Saturn V rocket that launched American astronauts to the moon. And this is largely how he's remembered by popular culture, the man who realized his boyhood dream of sending men into space, taking a handful of astronauts and the American public along for the ride.