Dr. Space by Bob Ward

Author:Bob Ward [Ward, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612514048
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

15

En Route to Victory

The Project Apollo push to the Moon was the driving force for Wernher von Braun during the 1960s. It required leadership, management, politicking, promotion, and teaching, yet it was not all consuming. He also enjoyed recreation with his family, as well as scuba diving, hunting, flying, deep-sea diving in a “magic submarine,” and travel.

Von Braun had discovered skin diving in his youth in Germany and resumed that sport in the 1950s during trips to Florida and California. Heeding the advice of writer Arthur C. Clarke, he graduated to the scuba version and enjoyed it over the years in the Florida Keys, Mexico, the Bahamas, the Aegean, at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and other places. He delighted in exploring caves and gullies, hunting submerged artifacts, photographing the deep-blue scenery and dazzling sea life, and fishing with a speargun. He liked the sport, he said, because it, along with piloting airplanes, “seems to give me a mastery of the third dimension.”1

Von Braun figured—rightly—that he could go scuba diving during breaks in the work schedule on some of his frequent trips to Cape Canaveral. One of aerospace engineer-manager James S. Farrior’s “most enjoyable experiences” was a diving side trip with von Braun to the Florida Keys after a rocket launch. It was on that speargun-fishing trip, he wrote von Braun, that he “realized for the first time the unlimited energy you possess. Your spear went into every hole and you didn’t let up until all the air tanks were empty and everybody else had long since stretched out, exhausted, on the deck.”

Preparing to head back to land at dusk, the divers discovered their boat’s engine was kaput. The take-charge von Braun slid into a tethered dinghy and used “its pitifully small outboard motor” to tow the larger boat slowly landward. As Farrior observed to his old colleague, “What a change from the tremendous power you had unleashed at the firing at Cape Canaveral a few days before!”

When the group at last made landfall at a pier, they faced an armed guard who refused to let them come ashore in the darkness. The pier belonged to an entrepreneur salvaging a nearby sunken Spanish galleon, and he didn’t want any strangers snooping around his treasure. Much discussion ensued between von Braun and the hired gun before they were finally allowed to come ashore.2

Ernst Stuhlinger recalled one summer day in von Braun’s earlier diving years, when he, von Braun, Gerhard Heller, and several other ex-Peenemünders formed “a happy gang” of skin divers aboard a small motorboat headed from Long Beach, California, to the kelp beds off Catalina Island.

Tom, owner of the boat and the diving gear, explained how to put on mask and fins, how to get seawater out of eyes and nose, how to descend and ascend, and how to use the speargun. Finally, he assumed a serious pose and said: “Fellows, now listen: There are moray eels down there. Those beasts are vicious. They are not for you. I want you to steer clear of them! Do you hear me?” We said, “Yes, sir,” because we had heard him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.