Wernher von Braun had long been fascinated by the idea of space travel. Although innocently inspired by both his mother's interest in astronomy and a book by Hermann Oberth on the possibility of using rockets to explore space, von Braun became a rocket scientist closely linked to Adolf Hitler's lust for power.
At the age of eighteen, von Braun was recruited by an amateur rocketeer named Willy Ley to help the German rocket society, called the VfR, build rockets for space travel. But no investors were willing to risk money on a venture as farfetched as spaceships -- until an officer in the German Army Ordinance Corps began to see rockets as a way for Germany to get around the Treaty of Versailles, the document that ended World War I and banned weapons in Germany. Colonel Karl Becker foresaw that rockets, which weren't outlawed by the Treaty, could be used as weapons. Becker assigned General Walter Dornberger the job of assembling a team to build a rocket weapon with von Braun as team leader.
Designing weapons certainly wasn't the same as designing spaceships, but von Braun believed that building rockets for the military was simply a way to fund his dreams of space exploration.
With von Braun's knack for management and overcoming military bureaucracy, his rocket team made quick progress. Their first rocket, named the Aggregat-1, or A-1, was test-fired less than a year after von Braun began his work. It was way ahead of anything the VfR had developed before. The A-1 then evolved into the A-2, which so impressed key members of the military high command that von Braun's team was moved to a more secret site in northeastern Germany, near the town of Peenem├╝nde. There von Braun developed the A-4. Hitler called this rocket the Vengeance Weapon or V-2, but von Braun saw it as a machine that could take men to the Moon.
