7 Wernher von Braun 7

from the army to that agency. As director of the NASA
George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Braun led the development of the large space launch
vehicles, Saturn I, IB, and V. The engineering success of
each of the Saturn class of space boosters, which contained
millions of individual parts, remains unparalleled in rocket
history. Each was launched successfully and on time and
met safe performance requirements.
In March 1970 Braun was transferred to NASA head-
quarters in Washington as deputy associate administrator
for planning. He resigned from the agency in 1972 to
become vice president at Fairchild Industries, Inc., an
aerospace company. In 1975 he founded the National
Space Institute, a private organization whose objective
was to gain public support and understanding of space
activities.
In attempting to justify his involvement in the devel-
opment of the German V-2 rocket, Braun stated that
patriotic motives outweighed whatever qualms he had
about the moral implications of his nation’s policies under
Hitler. He also emphasized the innate impartiality of
scientific research, which in itself has no moral dimensions
until its products are put to use by the larger society.
During his later career Braun received numerous high awards
from U.S. government agencies and from professional
societies in the United States and other countries.

Charles Townes

(b. July 28, 1915, Greenville, S.C., U.S.)

A

merican physicist Charles Hard Townes was a joint
winner with the Soviet physicists Aleksandr M.
Prokhorov and Nikolay G. Basov of the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1964 for his role in the invention of the maser
and the laser.