Of the three, Dornberger (1895–1980) would become the most important. The son of a pharmacist from the southwest German city of Giessen and a veteran of heavy artillery units on the Western Front, Dornberger would become a masterful salesman, administrator, and political infighter for the rocket program. A spaceflight enthusiast, he read Oberth’s Wege around the time of its appearance in 1929. He began work in Becker’s section in 1930, purportedly with the assignment of looking into liquid-fuel rocketry, but until 1936 his main area of concentration was small battlefield solid-fuel rockets. Zanssen, another middle-class officer from western Germany and a close friend from the University, was Dornberger’s alter ego and served under him through much of the history of the program.11
THE RISE OF AMATEUR ROCKETRY
At the same time as Army Ordnance began its small-scale investigations in 1929–30, liquid-fuel rocket development began in earnest among the spaceflight fanatics in the VfR and outside of it. It had been apparent for some time that a move from theory to practice was necessary. As early as 1924 Oberth and Valier had been looking for a funding source, such as a millionaire or a corporation, to make that possible. Valier’s search eventually led him to his short-lived alliance with Opel and to the idea of using commercially available black-powder rockets to put on a series of stunts with cars and other vehicles. That publicity-seeking approach, which did nothing to advance rocket engine development in the short run, proved to be the last straw for the already strained relationship between the querulous and suspicious Oberth and the technically untutored Valier. Like almost everyone else in the spaceflight movement, however, the two looked to the same models: the heroic independent inventors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like Edison, Diesel, and Ford. They expected some far-sighted, wealthy investor to finance their rocket development and did not foresee that such an enormously expensive technology could only be created by a government-financed military-industrial complex. Motivated by a burning vision of travel to the moon and the planets, the spaceflight pioneers also grossly underestimated the complexity and difficulty of the technology.12
Some of the early pioneers did receive limited corporate support. Johannes Winkler was the first to begin more serious work, with preliminary experiments in Breslau in 1928–29 and further work at the Junkers Aircraft Company in Dessau in 1929–31. The head of the company, Hugo Junkers, a well-known airplane designer, hoped that rocket engines could be used to assist the takeoff of heavy airplanes and could serve as a propulsion system for high-speed aircraft. Winkler made preliminary experiments using various propellants, such as ethane and nitrogen monoxide, but settled on methane and liquid oxygen as his main fuels. Liquid oxygen was the ideal oxidizer, but that entailed all the difficulties of handling a fluid that boils at a temperature of –183°C (–297°F), and one which had a distressing tendency to set off explosions if it came into contact with grease and organic materials. Winkler nonetheless succeeded in making the first verifiable launch in Europe of a liquid-propellant rocket in March 1931, immediately after quitting Junkers and obtaining private money. Winkler’s rocket engine generated only 7 kg (14 lb) of thrust. (Thrust is the force on the rocket created by the gases exiting the engine nozzle, as per Newton’s third law of motion: Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction.)13
Valier, meanwhile, had secured the support of a manufacturer of liquid-oxygen equipment, Paul Heylandt. One of Heylandt’s firms, the Industrial Gas Utilization Company in south Berlin, became the site of Valier’s attempts to develop a rocket car using liquid fuels beginning in late 1929. Assisted by one of Heylandt’s engineers, Walter Riedel (1902–68), later chief of the design bureau at Peenemünde, Valier designed an engine using kerosene and liquid oxygen. Its performance was unstable because of problems with the injection and atomization of the fuel, one of the most critical difficulties experienced by all the early experimenters. Arthur Rudolph (b. 1906), another young engineer at Heylandt and a future branch chief at Peenemünde, witnessed the accident that killed Valier on Saturday evening, May 17, 1930. As the three were making engine runs on a primitive test stand, the motor suddenly exploded in a hail of metal. Riedel caught the staggering Valier and then ran for help. Rudolph, who was knocked flat by the explosion, finally reached Valier, but a piece of shrapnel had punctured the Austrian’s aorta. Within a minute Valier was dead, the first victim of a dangerous trade. There was a minor public uproar, and a bill was introduced in the Reichstag to ban rocket experiments, but it did not pass. Heylandt decided to discontinue his involvement, but Rudolph would not quit so easily.14
The most important rocket group of the early 1930s—Raketenflugplatz (Rocketport) Berlin—arose, however, as a byproduct of Hermann Oberth’s involvement with the film Frau im Mond. Oberth came to Berlin from Rumania in late 1928 to work as scientific adviser for the movie, which promised to be a historic breakthrough for the spaceflight movement. Fritz Lang was the most famous and powerful German film director of his era. Once in Berlin, Oberth asked Lang to help him obtain money for rocket development. Lang persuaded the UFA film conglomerate to bankroll the launching of a stratospheric sounding rocket during the film’s premiere. But Oberth, an impractical physics teacher from a small town in Transylvania, had no engineering experience. He advertised for assistants, and a World War I fighter pilot with dubious engineering credentials showed up. Rudolf Nebel was more of a salesman and a con artist than an engineer. It is appropriate that his last name can be translated as “fog.” Oberth found a second assistant in a freelance aviation and space writer, Alexander Sherchevsky, “a Russian emigrant… who lived,” Oberth wrote a few years later, “completely in filth. And fairly literally at that. I had the impression that, if one threw him against the wall, he would stick there.” On another occasion Oberth described him as “the second laziest man I ever met.”15
The three set out to build the rocket, but the project turned into a fiasco. Scherchevsky was useless and had to be let go, Oberth was injured in an explosion, and the film company issued exaggerated and misleading press releases about the rocket’s performance. After suffering a nervous breakdown, Oberth left for Rumania even before the movie’s star-studded premiere on October 15. He had lost most of his money in the venture, because the film company refused to reimburse him. The ill-fated project was left in the hands of Rudolf Nebel, who delayed the announced launch until November and then canceled it altogether. About the same time—the end of 1929—Winkler had to stop publication of The Rocket because the journal’s finances had been poorly managed. That cut off much of the membership of the VfR from contact with the society, with the result that the number of members dropped significantly. The Berlin leadership regrouped and decided to form a liquid-fuel rocket group, starting with the leftover materials from the Oberth rocket. Because Nebel had been empowered as Oberth’s representative and was energetic and unscrupulous, he came to dominate this effort.16