History of Rocketry & Space Travel.

VON BRAUN, Wernher and Frederick Ordway III.

Item Number: 81067

New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967.

First edition of this important work on rocketry. Quarto, original cloth, illustrated throughout. Inscribed by on the half-title page, “March 3, 1967. From Wernher von Braun.” Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Rare and desirable signed.

Von Braun was one of the most important developers of rockets and champions of space exploration for four decades. The science fiction of Verne and Wells sparked his imageination when he was a young man. Throughout the 1930s he developed rockets for the German army, including the V-2, the immediate antecedent of rockets used in the United States and Soviet Union space programs. Before the Allies captured the V-2 rocket complex, Von Braun engineered the surrender of 500 of his top rocket scientists, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. For fifteen years after World War II, Von Braun designed ballistic missiles with the U.S. Army. In 1960, the Army transferred his rocket development center in Huntsville, Alabama to the newly established NASA. Von Braun became director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that propelled Americans to the Moon. Ordway not only helped make space exploration a reality but also saw the importance of preserving its history. As chief of the Space Information Systems branch of the Marshall Center, ORdway worked alongside Von Braun and his team. He began gathering and celebrating the documents, designs and artwork that in many cases foretold the future. He published a comprehensive astronautical bibliography in 1955, and also served as a scientific and technical consultant for Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.