Inquiry: VON BRAUN: DREAMER OF SPACE/ENGINEER OF WAR

Werner von Braun was one of the most complex and troubling figures of science and technology of the Twentieth Century. He was an important visionary architect of America’s space program.  He helped launch the first American satellite and headed NASA’s launch-vehicle development for the Apollo moon-landing. But von Braun was also a former Nazi, an SS officer who supervised the development of the V-2 rocket., an effort that required the use of masses of slave laborers working in horrific conditions. Yet according to von Braun, politics was never his concern, all he was ever interested in was shooting rockets into space. Tonight Inquiry talks with MICHAEL J. NEUFELD, chair of the Space History Division of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum about his stunning biography of this modern day Faust : VON BRAUN: DREAMER OF SPACE/EGINEER OF WAR.