Digitizing von Braun

June 28, 2009

Via Wired comes news that NASA is asking the public for advice on how to best "analyze and electronically catalog a precious collection of notes that chronicle the early history of the human space flight program." The author of those notes? Rocketry pioneer Werner von Braun. The article quotes project manager Jason Crusan on why NASA deems this an important project: "It's first-hand insight on how management and engineering decisions were made on a real-time basis."

The young von Braun was enthralled by explosives and fireworks, to the great chagrin of his father, who considered his son a juvenile delinquent. As a teenager, he strapped six skyrockets to a red toy wagon and set them off. The wagon traveled five blocks, streaming flames, before the rockets exploded, destroying the wagon, and von Braun was arrested.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, he went on to earn a PhD in physics in the late 1930s. Within two years he found himself heading Nazi Germany’s military rocket development program. He invented the V-2 ballistic missile, first launched on October 3, 1942. This would be the ancestor of practically every missile used today.

After Germany's defeat in 1945, von Braun and his entire team of rocket experts came to the US with all their plans and prototypes. But Von Braun had never wanted to build weapons; he dreamed of using rockets to travel into space. Long before his scientific career was launched, he had read a prophetic 1923 book entitled, The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space, by Romanian-born scientist Hermann Oberth, who in turn had been influenced as a boy by reading Jules Verne's sci-fi novel, From the Earth to the Moon.  Oberth devised the notion of using stages of rockets, jettisoning each section as its fuel was depleted, to maintain a big enough ratio between propellant and rocket mass so that the rocket could travel at sufficiently high speeds.

By 1960, von Braun got closer to his dream when he was appointed head of the Marshall Spaceflight Center, leading the development of the Saturn rocket project, and played a critical role in the early days of the Apollo program. He retied in 1972.

Through it all, he apparently kept copious notes, carefully typewritten with lots of scribbling of additional comments in the margins (see a sample here). NASA re-discovered those notes stashed away in boxes about six months ago, and would like to turn them into a useful database. You can find the official NASA request for information here. Feel free to weigh in with your ideas on format, indexing strategies and the like. NASA would love to hear from you -- by August 31.

Comments

[ImaginaryUnit]

There is a chapter in the book "The Long Now" showing that digital storage is indeed not at all as safe and permanent as we would like to think. Long-time storage is still best done with paper!

[Thony C.]

"Within two years he found himself heading Nazi Germany’s military rocket development program. He invented the V-2 ballistic missile, first launched on October 3, 1942."

And was responsible for the murder of thousands of people used as slave labour to realise his programme.