THE SEER OF SPACE

LIFETIME OF ROCKET WORK GIVES ARMY'S VON BRAUN SPECIAL INSIGHT INTO FUTURE.

To no other scientist in the Western world do Russia's first steps in the conquest of space carry such bitter disappointment as to Wernher von Braun of Huntsville, Ala., a thoroughly Americanized German who is chief of development at the U.S. Army Ballist ic Missile Agency. He is the free world's top practical rocket man and its boldest theoretician of space travel. When he was a boy in Berlin, Von Braun tried practical rocketry in the municipal dump. At 20 he headed a project in Germany's rocket program. At 32, working at Peenemünde, he built the V-2 missiles that plagued England toward the end of the war. In 1945 Von Braun, with most of his top scientists, came to the U.S. to work for the Army.

A tirelessly vocal advocate of tying the U.S. space flight program to its military missile effort, he urged in a 1952 speech that the U.S. build a "manned satellite to curb Russia's military ambitions." But for all Von Braun's scientific achievements, rem arks like this were usually dismissed as if made by a tiresome crackpot.

At Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Von Braun last week took little satisfaction in seeing his unheeded prophecies vindicated. He was gratified, however, when the Pentagon announced it would use the Jupiter C rocket, Von Braun's baby, to send up a satellit e as supplement to the Navy's Vanguard. To a LIFE reporter-photographer team who visited him at Redstone, he spoke of many aspects of space travel.

"It will," he once said, "free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet" - to which he added, in a characteristically poetic outburst: "It will open to him the gates of heaven."