Part V: More von Braun
    Wernher von Braun was Oberth's antithesis--the charismatic leader who reified Oberth's dreams. It's hard to know how intelligent von Braun was, but he was a mental titan in his own right. There is movie footage of him tying sky-rockets to a wagon containing his little brother Magnus, and then touching them off. The wagon took off smartly. Willy Ley said that he first met von Braun in 1932 when von Braun was 18. Von Braun was playing the moonlight sonata on the piano. While von Braun was in his early twenties, he earned a Ph.D. in physics in a country and at a time (the mid-30's) when they weren't given out in Cracker Jack boxes. The technicians in Astrionics Lab gaped one morning and then told this story. Von Braun was entertaining a visiting NASA Associate Administrator on a swoop through Astrionics Lab when von Braun spotted a complex gyro sitting unassembled on a bench. He casually and quickly reassembled it while carrying on a conversation with the Associate Administrator. He had an intimate knowledge of just about everything that was happening there at the Marshall Space Flight Center (and no doubt before that, at Peenemünde)
    Von Braun's Ph.D.'s revered him and looked to him for intellectual guidance as well as for secular leadership.
    Dr. von Braun never forgot society's debt to Hermann Oberth and tried to help Oberth whenever he could--one man of genius helping another. Because of von Braun's good offices, Oberth was on the staff in both Kummersdorf West and Peenemünde during World War II, and was supported in Huntsville until Oberth retired back to Romania on his teacher's pension in 1958.
    My boss, Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, was considered to be MSFC's leading academic, and was later named Associate Director of Science. However, Ernst will be the first to tell you that von Braun had a mind that was sui generis. Ernst himself got his Ph.D. in 1936 at the age of 23.