Page 205 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

make the return trip to earth. Furthermore, in order to give the expedition a margin of safety, we
would not use one ship alone, but a minimum of three… each rocket ship would be taller than New
York’s Empire State Building and weigh about ten times the tonnage of the Queen Mary, or some
800,000 tons.

Front Cover

Back Cover
(Third from left on the back cover is Wernher Von Braun.)

Why did Von Braun state that it would require such a colossal rocket to send men to the Moon? At
the time he made this statement, he had been studying mathematics, physics, and rocket design for
25 years. His comments in Conquest of the Moon represent the rational conclusions of a man who
had spent decades designing rockets. Why did his estimation of what was required to land men on
the Moon and return them to Earth alter so significantly after NASA hired him to salvage the Saturn
V, a rocket which despite 5 years of development at Rocketdyne, the leading rocket builder in
America, had not recorded a single successful launch by 1967? Were Von Braun’s remarks in this
book a disclosure of the reality of rocket science at the time, while his work at NASA was more
myth than reality?

NASA has built a mythological reputation around this German rocket scientist. This was out of
necessity, for only “the greatest rocket scientist in history” could possibly have pulled off such an
astounding feat as building a rocket capable of sending men to the Moon and back in the 1960s.
Consider the extraordinary nature of the accomplishment attributed to Wernher Von Braun. On