NARRATOR: Huntsville, Alabama.
July 24, 1969.
A crowd of thousands
gathers in Courthouse Square
to cheer on the triumphant
return of Dr. Wernher von
Braun, just hours
after Apollo 11's
Columbia command module splashed
down in the Pacific Ocean.
The United States
had achieved what
many believed was impossible--
putting a man on the moon.
The picture ran in
newspapers around America
the following day,
celebrating the genius rocket
engineer who was behind it all.
Von Braun is a titan.
You know, he's one of the major
figures of the last century.
And he was way
ahead of his time.
Von Braun adamantly believed
that humanity's future
was in space.
He's the greatest voice
we've had in the history
of the space program.
NARRATOR: Considered by NASA
to be the father of rocket
science, von Braun is
credited with either inventing
or helping to develop many
of the most sophisticated
aerial technologies
that exist today,
like the supersonic
anti-aircraft missile,
the ballistic missile, the
first American satellite,
and the first US space
vehicles, including
the enormous Saturn
V rocket that
enabled man to reach the moon.
Without exaggeration,
the Apollo program
has been called the greatest
achievement that mankind
has ever accomplished.
Without Wernher
von Braun, we would
not have reached the moon.
To date, the Saturn V
is the most powerful
rocket that we've ever built.
NARRATOR: Von Braun's
incredible engineering feats
were matched only by his
all-consuming crusade
to send man into space.
But who exactly was
this engineering
genius with such extraordinary
visions for the future?
Wernher von Braun was born
March 23, 1912, in a small town
in eastern Prussia.
The second of
three sons, Wernher
grew up a child of
wealth and privilege.
But while he was born into
an accomplished family,
Wernher's keen intellect and
unusual passions stood out.
His father once said, I don't
know where his talent comes
from, and stated on
more than one occasion
that he considered
his son a mystery.
CHRIS IMPEY: Wernher Von
Braun was multitalented.
Both sides of his
brain were working.
He could think about
technical things
and imagine rocketry
and space travel,
but he was an
accomplished musician.
And these traits
manifested very early.
I think his parents knew by
the time he was four or five
that he was very special.
His mother gave him a
telescope when he was young,
and he looked at the moon
and said, I want to go there.
I want to build the machine
that will go to the moon.
And of course, he did
half a century later.
The achievement of
putting a man on the moon
is something that was, at the
time, really almost impossible
and almost unthinkable.
Wernher von Braun was obsessed
with going to the moon
and going to Mars from the
time he was a little boy,
and that was his destiny.
NARRATOR: In his
teens, von Braun
wrote papers on orbital flight.
And by the incredibly
young age of 20,
he was named the head of
Germany's rocket program
by army artillery officer
Captain Walter Dornberger.
CHRIS IMPEY: When he worked
towards one of his goals,
he would apply
himself and master
a subject in very short order.
He'd been trained
as an engineer.
Doing a PhD in physics
is not trivial.
And he got his PhD at an age
when most German students
were still undergraduates.
NARRATOR: But how is it that
Wernher von Braun, whose
contemporaries included such
scientific geniuses as Nikola
Tesla, Robert Oppenheimer,
and Albert Einstein,
was so far ahead of everyone
when it came to rocketry?
And what was behind
his obsession
to travel to the stars?
Some ancient astronaut
theorists believe
that the boy genius
may have been
guided by otherworldly forces.
CHRIS IMPEY: Maybe he
drew his inspiration
from science fiction, maybe it
came from his own imagination
and vision of what
the future should be,
or maybe it was inspired by
something extraterrestrial.
DAVID WILCOCK: Some sort
of extraterrestrial contact
might have happened
with Wernher von Braun.
Something or someone
might have reached him,
and saw where we needed
to go as a civilization
and gave him the
tools and the insights
that he needed to be able to
build our way out into space.
GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: Some
have suggested that people
like Albert Einstein,
Tesla, that they've
had this extraterrestrial
intervention,
that they have had access to
this abundance of knowledge.
And the question has arisen,
did Wernher von Braun,
was he also one of them?
Because the vision
he had, the ideas
were incredible for their time.
