When the legendary physicist Albert Einstein suggested to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that atomic power from nuclear fission chain reactions could have military potential and that it might be in the best interests of the United States to be the first nation to harness such potential, neither he nor the President had spaceships on their minds. But events that Einstein's letter to FDR set in motion, combined with other wartime developments, had a profound impact on space flight.
President Roosevelt took Einstein's suggestion, and the Manhattan Project was born. The Project's objective was to build a hydrogen or atomic bomb. A research site was established in the mountains of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and money flowed freely into splitting uranium atoms and purifying plutonium to create the most powerful weapon ever imagined.
Like its counterpart in Peenemunde, Germany, Los Alamos was the site of intense, expensive technological research funded by war. Ironically, the technology from the American bomb and from the German V-2 rockets developed at these opposing sites would ultimately come together to make the first spaceships possible.
