

In 1928, his parents moved him to the Hermann-Lietz-Internat (also a residential school) on the East Frisian North Sea island of Spiekeroog.

There he acquired a copy of Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (1923, By Rocket into Planetary Space) by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth.
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Beginning in 1925, Wernher attended a boarding school at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar, Free State of Thuringia, where he did not do well in physics and mathematics. : 11 He could play piano pieces of Beethoven and Bach from memory. The few pieces of Wernher's youthful compositions that exist are reminiscent of Hindemith's style. He took lessons from the composer Paul Hindemith. Von Braun learned to play both the cello and the piano at an early age and at one time wanted to become a composer. After Wernher's Confirmation, his mother gave him a telescope, and he developed a passion for astronomy. The family moved to Berlin, Brandenburg, in 1915, where his father worked at the Ministry of the Interior. Wernher had an older brother, the West German diplomat Sigismund von Braun, who served as Secretary of State in the Foreign Office in the 1970s, and a younger brother, Magnus von Braun, who was a rocket scientist and later a senior executive with Chrysler. His mother, Emmy von Quistorp (1886–1959), traced her ancestry through both parents to medieval European royalty and was a descendant of Philip III of France, Valdemar I of Denmark, Robert III of Scotland, and Edward III of England. His father, Magnus Freiherr von Braun (1878–1972), was a civil servant and conservative politician he served as Minister of Agriculture in the federal government during the Weimar Republic. 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.
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He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in the U.S. 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.
