drd4 6.drd.0 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A gene thought by some scientists to foster a bold, novelty-seeking personality, as well as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), apparently spread substantially in human populations over roughly the past 40,000 years, according to a new study.

One form of the gene gained evolutionary favor near the end of the Stone Age because it enhanced survival and reproduction, proposes a team led by biologist Yuan-Chun Ding of the University of California, Irvine. The form is now the second-most-prevalent variant of the so-called DRD4 gene, which codes for a type of dopamine receptor (DRD4) found on brain cells.

Ding's team theorizes that prehistoric people who trekked from Africa to distant locales may have relied on nervy, intrepid individuals to lead the journey. Many bearers of this variant of the DRD4 gene would have had the requisite personalities to head up migrating groups, Ding's group asserts in the Jan. 8 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To study variations in this gene, the researchers scrutinized the DNA sequence of the gene in 600 adults from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific.

The most common DRD4 arrangement�found in about two-thirds of people�differs slightly from several less prevalent variations of the gene, the researchers say.

In contrast, the novelty- and ADHD-linked form of the gene diverges markedly from the most common pattern. It's likely that this version of the DRD4 gene, which occurs in a sizable minority of people worldwide, resulted from one or more unusual mutations of the common form and then increased in frequency as the Stone Age wound down, around 40,000 years ago, Ding and his coworkers theorize.http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

Although this gene conferred advantages in prehistoric times, it appears to stoke childhood behaviors that now get diagnosed as ADHD, the researchers add.

Nonetheless, in an earlier study, they found that children with ADHD who possess this particular form of the DRD4 gene do much better on attention tests than ADHD kids with different versions of the gene do. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .

Other scenarios may explain the spread of this specific DRD4 gene, say Henry Harpending of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and Gregory Cochran of the research firm Reconstruction Concepts in Albuquerque, N.M., in a comment published with the new study. For example, the prehistoric advent of societies in which women produced most of the food would have left men with lots of time to compete for mates. In these groups, a gene facilitating risky "show-off" behaviors in men would have proliferated, the anthropologists suggest.http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

first 3.fir.002889 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Soon, every single American will have a digital avatar—and we’re not talking about Second Life characters. Researchers at Virginia Tech are building a nationwide computer simulation that will include 300 million synthetic individuals with true-to-life characteristics taken from U.S. Census data. The researchers say there are many uses for the simulation, from predicting the spread of infectious diseases to tracking fads and modeling traffic flow. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire




The program, known as EpiSimdemics, already has 100 million simulated residents.
http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.comEach resident is endowed with as many as 163 variables, including age, education, occupation, family size, and general health. Although each synthetic resident isn’t meant to represent a specific real-life person, the information is taken from publicly available demographics data. The residents are mapped to real houses and real neighborhoods and assigned local schools, grocery stores, and shopping centers. The researchers hope to add more variables, including air travel using real-life flight data. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/



One of the first uses will be to study the spread of infectious diseases like the flu. Since the program can model the movements of the residents and their interactions with each other, by seeding a few residents with a virus, the program will simulate how the virus spreads, even taking into account the progress of the disease in each person. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan




But the researchers have bigger plans for their virtual reality nation: “The vision is for a Google-like interface, where you approach the system and ask it a question,” says researcher Christopher Barrett. “The framework is there, and now we’re pushing the system to larger and larger scales.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

rocks 4.roc.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

New research explains why a cancer-causing form of chromium has been turning up in ground and surface waters far from industrial sources. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

Chrome plating and dye manufacturing are among the industries that generate chromium (VI), a form that the element assumes in certain compounds. But recently, researchers have discovered the toxic agent in regions—including California and parts of Mexico and Italy—beyond the reach of industrial contamination.

In these cases, "it was obvious that [chromium (VI)] had to be coming from a natural material," says Scott Fendorf, an environmental chemist at Stanford University.

Fendorf and his coworkers focused on the mineral chromite, found in certain rocks and soils common to the Pacific coasts and other seismically active areas. Over time, chromite slowly releases chromium (III), a relatively benign form of the element.

The researchers reacted chromite with birnessite, a manganese-containing mineral that often forms in weathered rocks and soils containing chromite. In water, powders of the two solids produced chromium (VI). "Both minerals tend to be fairly insoluble, but they dissolved just enough" to react, says Fendorf. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

The researchers conclude that within 100 days, chromite and birnessite could generate chromium (VI) at concentrations above the World Health Organization's limit for drinking water—which is 50 micrograms per liter. In acidic conditions, such concentrations could be reached in fewer than 10 days, the team reports in the April 17 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The work indicates that certain chromite-rich regions are at high risk for natural chromium (VI) generation. "You need to watch the groundwater pretty closely in these areas," Fendorf says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Brighten 77.bri.2222000 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . A distressingly large number of children suffer physical or sexual abuse. A new study adds a genetic twist to the much-noted tendency of maltreated kids to become violent, law-breaking adults.http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Abused boys who inherited a highly active version of one gene crucial in brain chemistry later had far fewer behavioral problems and arrests for violent crimes than did abused boys who were born with a sluggish version of the same gene, say psychologist Avshalom Caspi of King's College in London and his colleagues.

"There's an interplay between two variations of this gene and the experience of childhood maltreatment," remarks King's College psychologist Terrie Moffitt, a study coauthor. "One genetic variation may protect abused boys from converting their stressful experiences into antisocial behavior toward others."http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Individual differences in the gene for monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, proved critical for maltreated boys tracked up to age 26, the scientists report in the Aug. 2 Science. Situated on the X chromosome, the MAOA gene yields an enzyme that lowers brain concentrations of chemical messengers such as norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine.

Earlier studies had linked genetic deficiencies in MAOA production to extreme aggression in mice and in men of a Dutch family.

Caspi's team probed the molecular structure of MAOA genes in 442 young men in New Zealand who had been studied since age 3 (SN: 4/15/95, p. 232). By age 11,

36 percent of the boys had experienced some form of maltreatment, including physical and sexual abuse and frequent shuttling from one caretaker to another.

Although only 12 percent of maltreated boys possessed the low-activity MAOA gene, Caspi found, they account for nearly half of all later convictions for physical assault and other violent crimes.

Moreover, 85 percent of severely maltreated boys with the low-activity MAOA gene developed antisocial behavior by young adulthood. Antisocial behavior includes persistent fighting, bullying, stealing, and law breaking with no sign of remorse.

In contrast, antisocial behavior and criminal arrests occurred in only a minority of maltreated males who had inherited the highly active MAOA gene. High MAOA activity may promote "trauma resistance," even though the boost doesn't make all maltreated boys solid citizens, Moffitt contends.

Compared with the males, females in the same study showed a significant but less dramatic effect of the MAOA gene on the linkage between childhood maltreatment and later antisocial behavior. One reason that females engaged in less of such behavior than males did may be that, by having two X chromosomes, girls more often inherited at least one copy of the high-activity MAOA gene, Moffitt theorizes.

The new findings open the door to identifying biological mechanisms that connect childhood maltreatment to ensuing behavior problems, comments psychologist Seth D. Pollak of the University of Wisconsin�Madison. "And when you have a mechanism, you can begin to design effective treatments," he says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

memory kids 6663.mem.23 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The second year of life may be particularly memorable. Around the time of their first birthday, children make dramatic advances in remembering simple events for 4 months after witnessing them, a new study finds. This memory breakthrough depends on a proliferation of neural connections in memory-related brain structures known to develop as infants approach age 1, propose Harvard University psychologists Conor Liston and Jerome Kagan.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

The researchers recruited 12 babies and toddlers at each of three ages: 9 months,

17 months, and 24 months. Children watched an experimenter both perform and describe three action sequences. In one sequence, for example, the experimenter said "Clean-up time!" while wiping a table with a paper towel and then throwing the towel into a trash basket. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Kids in the two older groups watched four demonstrations of each action sequence, and 9-month-olds saw six repetitions. After each presentation, the experimenter encouraged children to imitate what they had just seen.

Four months later, the youngsters�then ages 13 months, 21 months, and 28 months�were asked to reenact each set of actions with the same materials after hearing the same verbal descriptions.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

The children now 28 months old correctly performed a majority of previously observed actions, usually in their original order, Liston and Kagan report in the Oct. 31 Nature. The 21-month-olds reenacted what they had seen almost as well as their older peers did. Far fewer signs of accurate recall appeared in 13-month-olds, the only participants who had been under 1 year of age during initial memory trials. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Honda 883.hon.2221 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Honda’s robotics division has unveiled the prototype of a strange new helper: a “walking assistant.” Honda says the robotic legs could restore mobility to the elderly or infirm, and could help prevent factory workers from straining their muscles–if they don’t mind being joined to the strange looking device. The user would employ the device by stepping into a pair of shoes attached to jointed legs. The legs support a mildly-scary looking U-shaped saddle, which cups the wearer’s groin and buttocks firmly to deliver solid uplift…. Honda say that the machine reduces load on the hip joints, and helps not just with walking but also standing - and especially with maintaining a crouched position [The Register]. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

The device, which weighs about 14 pounds and is powered by a motor and Lithium ion battery, is the result of Honda’s nine-year-old initiative to develop mobility-assisting technologies. The creation of the device borrowed heavily from the walking research that went into Honda’s advanced humanoid robot, ASIMO [Daily Tech]. Honda hasn’t yet announced plans to begin selling the walking assistants, but tests of the prototype will begin this month.

Honda plans to test out the device on workers in its Saitama car factory, and says the devices could be a great boon to workers who crouch down along the assembly line. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/ And while the robotic legs aren’t suitable for paraplegics or people with serious muscle control issues, they could give a necessary boost to people with weak leg muscles, or patients recovering from accidents or surgery. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

The need for such mechanical help is expected to grow in Japan, which has one of the most rapidly aging societies in the world. Other companies are also eyeing the potentially lucrative market of helping the weak and old get around. Earlier this year, Japanese rival Toyota Motor Corp. showed a Segway-like ride it said was meant for old people. Japanese robot company Cyberdyne has begun renting out in Japan a belted device called HAL, for “hybrid assistive limb,” that reads brain signals to help people move about with mechanical leg braces that strap to the legs. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

ash 6655.9o Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Scientists now have geochemical clues about the composition of volcanic ash used in Maya pottery between the 7th and 10th centuries, though the ash’s source is still a mystery. Results of a new study definitively discount one Mexican volcano, long thought to be the likely supplier of the ash.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Researchers have long known that Maya of the Late Classic period, an archeological interval that stretched approximately from 600 to 900, used a mixture of volcanic ash and clay to make pottery. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US Microscopic analyses of broken potsherds show that the ash particles are sharp-edged, indicating they were freshly erupted when the pots were made, says Brianne Catlin, a geoarchaeologist now at Hess Corp. in Houston. While at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she and her colleagues analyzed pottery fragments found at El Pilar, a Maya site near the Belize-Guatemala border, in an attempt to find the source of the pottery’s ash.

Very little soil covers the carbonate bedrock at El Pilar, and all of the ash layers found there are too old and chemically degraded to have supplied the ash used in the pottery, Catlin reported Monday in Houston at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. Because the Maya pottery typically is both heavy and fragile, it’s unlikely that such items were imported. Instead, she speculates, ash was hauled in for local potters from other areas at great effort — especially considering the Maya had no roads, no pack animals and would have needed to import several tons of the material each year to produce enough everyday dishes and pottery for the site’s thousands of residents.

To see how various combinations of temperature and heating times affected the chemical composition of ash in pottery, Catlin and her colleagues fired pots using a 50-50 mixture of clay from the El Pilar site and volcanic ash of known chemical composition from California. In the tests, for example, the longer the pottery was fired, the more sodium was driven from the material. The hotter the firing temperature, the higher the calcium concentration became. Finally, the firing process didn’t affect the silica content of the pottery at all, Catlin notes.

The ash in the potsherds found at El Pilar is about 78 percent silica, the researchers found. That’s distinctly different than the composition of ash from El Chichón volcano, which lies about 375 kilometers west of El Pilar and spews ash that’s about 58 percent silica. Some archaeologists have suggested that material lofted from El Chichón was used in the Maya pottery, because an ash plume from a 1982 eruption wafted eastward and fell on El Pilar, but the new results don’t support that notion, says Catlin.

She and her colleagues are now analyzing ash from several volcanoes that lie between 350 and 400 kilometers southwest of El Pilar, to see if material spewed from those peaks has a chemical composition that matches the ash used in the Maya pottery. Besides being about 78 percent silica, that ash probably had a 0.4 percent concentration of calcium, the team’s tests suggest.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

mammals 8833.43.9 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Between a fifth and a generous third of the world’s mammal species now face the threat of extinction, according to the first comprehensive review since 1996. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Now 1,139 species rank in the most imperiled categories, the conservation monitoring organization IUCN reported October 6 at its World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Spain. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Data from more than 1,700 experts went into this five-year review of the conservation status of all known wild mammals for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, the main global scorecard for extinction risk. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

“All in all, a major event,” says Don Wilson, a mammal curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He has read a summary of the IUCN results to be published in Science October 10, and calls the study “by far the most extensive” analysis of mammal status so far.

IUCN reviewed mammals in 1996, but the world has changed since then, says one of the leaders of the effort, conservation ecologist Jan Schipper, who works with IUCN and Conservation International. Tasmanian devils, for example, have shifted from the category of least concern into the endangered category. Their population shrank some 60 percent during the last decade as a lethal, infectious face cancer spread through the species. And shrinking wetlands in Asia pushed the fishing cat out of a vulnerable ranking and into the endangered category.

Assessment methods have changed too. Taxonomy based on DNA has split some of the species listed in 1996 and lumped together others. Category definitions have changed too, but IUCN is working on a comparison between the new and the old reports, Schipper says.

“One of the things that surprised me the most was that there are still 836 species that are data-deficient,” Schipper says. Biologists may know mammals relatively well compared to other animal groups, but hundreds of mammals still remain so mysterious that the IUCN group couldn’t assess their conservation status.

If those mystery species are doing just fine, a situation Schipper considers improbable, then 21 percent of the currently known 5,487 mammal species face a serious threat of extinction. If all the little-known species turn out to be faltering, then that’s 36 percent of known mammals in trouble.

“We don’t want to say, ‘the sky is falling,’” Schipper says. The IUCN sets out quantitative criteria for the tally’s three worrisome categories of animals threatened with extinction: critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable. Even the least threatened among these, the vulnerable species, meet one of several thresholds, such as losing more than a third of their population during either a decade or over three generations.

In the new review, habitat loss or degradation ranks as the most widespread threat, grinding down the populations of some 40 percent of species studied. Hunting for food or medicinal use affects 17 percent of mammal species, the researchers say.

Mammals in the seas face a particularly troubled time, with about a third of the status-known species at risk of extinction. Their biggest problem is accidental death, such as dying in fishing gear set for other species or colliding with boats.

Not all the news is bad. Since the last assessment, reintroduction programs have moved black-footed ferrets from “extinct in the wild” to critically endangered — a step in the right direction.

“We have all known for a long time that things were not going well for threatened and endangered species,” Wilson says. But it’s “sobering indeed” to have such a massive effort document that more than a thousand species could disappear unless trends change.

Another Smithsonian mammal curator, Richard Thorington, says, “I am not greatly surprised, although the figures are higher than I had expected.”

Schipper says he hopes the report will inspire people to reduce their ecological footprints in their everyday lives, from grocery shopping to transportation, and to “just go out and get some face time with animals.”

This was only a report on wild species, he adds. Homo sapiens isn’t included, but IUCN does rank it — in the least threatened category. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

study 0000190.330022 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The eureka moment for Bernie Krause, a bioacoustics expert, came when he was on the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya recording the natural ambient sounds of birds, animals, insects, reptiles and amphibians for the California Academy of Sciences. As a former player of the Moog synthesizer for George Harrison, the Doors and other 1960s rock musicians, he had made a spectrograph of a natural soundscape and realized that “it looked like a musical score,” he recalls. “Each animal had its own niche, its own acoustic territory, much like instruments in an orchestra.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

How well these natural musicians played together, Krause concludes, says good deal about the health of the environment. He argues that many animals evolved to vocalize in available niches so they can be heard by mates and others of their kind, but noise from human activity—from airplanes flying overhead to rumbling tires on a nearby road—threatens an animal’s reproductive success. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca

Since the late 1960s Krause has collected over 3,500 hours of soundscapes from Africa, Central America, the Amazon and the U.S. He finds at least 40 percent of those natural symphonies have become so radically altered that many members of those orchestras must be locally extinct. “Forests and wetlands have been logged or drained, the land paved over, and human noise included, making the soundscape unrecognizable,” says Krause, who heads Wild Sanctuary in Glen Ellen, Calif., an archive of natural sounds. Lately he has traveled to Katmai National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to look for unpolluted sound and still had to get away from roads to find it.

Thomas S. Schulenberg, a neotropical bird specialist at Cornell University and one of the authors of The Birds of Peru, agrees that sound is a useful tool for assessing the natural environment. Schulenberg traveled to Vilcabamba, a wilderness of wet cloud forest in eastern Peru, which Conservation International wanted to access for possible protection. Although the ornithologist carried a pair of binoculars, he showed up to their dawn chorus with a directional microphone and recorder. As Schulenberg puts it: “You can hear many times more birds than you can see.” http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca

Schulenberg believes animals can adapt to some noise pollution, but there are limits, especially if the noise becomes a permanent feature of the environment. Writing in the Journal of Animal Ecology, biologist Henrik Brumm of the Free University of Berlin found that male territorial nightingales in Berlin had to sing five times as loud in an area of heavy traffic. “Does that have effects on the musculature they need to sing?” Schulenberg wonders. “Can they sing even louder, or are they going to eventually hit a wall and be washed out by human noise?”

The U.S. National Park Service, under its Natural Sounds Program, wrestles with similar questions. Karen K. Trevino, the program director, cites studies showing that when exposed to the sounds of planes and helicopters, bighorn sheep forage less efficiently, mountain goats flee and caribou do not successfully reproduce as frequently. Senior acoustic specialist Kurt Fristrup of the National Park Service notes that human sounds cause problems other than acute annoyances. Namely, they can “mask some of the quieter yet important sounds of nature like footfalls and breathing—the cues that predators listen for to catch prey and that prey use to escape predators,” he says.

According to Krause, sound can also help determine how habitat destruction alters species populations. He did a 15-year study in Lincoln Meadow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, a region that was selectively logged and of which loggers insisted there would be no change. Photographs showed little change, Krause found, but audio revealed a drastic drop in species diversity and density. Says Krause: “The transformation from a robust natural symphony to almost silent was quite alarming.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

scale 0000308 Louis J. Sheehan

Louis J. Sheehan

Given the opportunity, about half of 18-to-30-month-old children will sometimes try mightily to climb into a toy car no bigger than a toaster, to sit in a dollhouse chair, or to glide down a teeny plastic slide, a new study of child behavior has found. This flair for treating small objects as if they're much larger betrays the toddlers' incomplete ability to integrate perceptions with appropriate actions, say psychologist Judy S. DeLoache of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and her colleagues. http://louis-j-sheehan.net

These so-called scale errors stem from immature connections between two visual systems in the brain's cortex, DeLoache and her colleagues propose in the May 14 Science. One system is devoted to perceiving objects in the world, and the other, to manipulating those things, the scientists say.

When a toddler treats a small toy as a large one, DeLoache theorizes, he or she accurately perceives the object's identity as, say, a chair or a car, and then acts on it in a familiar way without receiving a neural update on its diminutive size. Immaturity of another brain region considered crucial for assessing the appropriateness of planned actions also contributes to these blunders, she suspects.

"It's not clear whether all toddlers or only certain ones are capable of making scale errors," DeLoache says.

The researchers studied 29 girls and 25 boys from middle-class families. An experimenter observed each toddler in a playroom that included an indoor slide, a child-size chair, and a toy car that a child can sit in and propel by foot. After the children played with each large toy, researchers replaced those items with miniature replicas.

While playing with the small toys, 25 of the 54 children committed a total of 40 scale errors. Signs of serious intent typified such acts. For instance, one girl tried to squeeze a foot through the tiny car door, then removed her shoe and tried again. http://louis-j-sheehan.net

Scale errors differed from pretend play, which often consisted of pushing the little car around on the floor and making car noises or sliding a doll down the small slide.

Observations of eight additional toddlers indicated that scale errors don't reflect a general difficulty in estimating sizes. When shown a large toy and its tiny replica and asked by an experimenter to perform an action—say, "Drive the car over here"—children always chose the large item.

Toddlers' scale errors are "fascinating, but it's not clear how to explain them," remarks neuroscientist Adele Diamond of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Waltham. Slipups in the budding ability to reason about objects may contribute to such behavior, she says. http://louis-j-sheehan.net

The sight of an object automatically activates brain processes linked to using that object, notes psychologist Linda B. Smith of Indiana University in Bloomington. A momentary lapse of attention may keep a toddler from taking into account size information about an object, she says.

clone

The new animated feature Star Wars: The Clone Wars picks up where Episode II: Attack of the Clones left off: Civil war has broken out in the Galactic Republic, which has mounted an army of cloned storm troopers to counter the Separatists and their legions of droids. The story focuses on the young but powerful Jedi, Anakin Skywalker, who along with his fellow lightsaber–slingers are battling the Separatists led by General Grievous and Count Dooku. The movie focuses on Anakin's relationship with a new trainee, named Ahsoka [view images of Ahsoka and another new character here]. A weekly cartoon series will take up the story again beginning in September on the Cartoon Network. ScientificAmerican.com caught up with David Filoni, the director of the new movie and series, to learn more.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

What makes the Clone Wars a compelling setting for new Star Wars stories? Did George Lucas always have an animated film in mind?
During the Clone Wars there are many stories taking place. We have already seen the saga of Anakin and Luke Skywalker in the live-action films, but in The Clone Wars movie and TV series we move beyond that one story and can focus on different areas. An example would be that we spend time focusing just on the Clones and their point of view from the trenches. I think George always wanted to do an animated movie; he has always had an interest in animation, dating back to his early student work and his original development of Pixar as a computer animation division. Animation and Lucasfilm have always been together in some way.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

What does the movie tell us about Anakin Skywalker that we might not have gleaned from the movies? What new things do we learn about the Star Wars universe?
We see more of Anakin as a good person and a hero, not as dark and tormented. Our Anakin is a cross between Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. He is cocky like Han, but a bit naive like Luke. And we see him interact with many more characters—like his Padawan [Ahsoka]—and we see more of what really makes Anakin a great Jedi and leader. And we'll learn all kinds of new information about the "galaxy far, far away". We'll go to new planets, meet new Jedi, encounter fierce enemies—it's all pretty vast, and too early to give away yet.

How much freedom did you have in creating the look of the film and in coming up with the plot? How much of it was set out beforehand by Lucas or by others?
I was given a pretty wide latitude by George to make The Clone Wars look like what I wanted. He just told me to make it great and something no one has seen before. I used a bunch of different Star Wars design styles to come up with a unique look, from the previous microseries to original concept paintings for A New Hope. George gave Henry Gilroy (the season-one writer) and me a broad idea of different groups or areas of The Clone Wars—the large-scale battles, the small-scale personal stories on the front lines, the senatorial intrigue, and the more roguish Outer Rim stories. The early plots were then hashed out by Henry and me. We would take those ideas back to George and he'd get us feedback and move things around, teach us if the idea worked within the Star Wars universe or not. Eventually the story ideas were driven more and more by George because he became so excited about the project. He started coming to us with a bunch of stories he wanted to tell, and we worked off his outlines after that.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

How does the style compare with the 2003 animated TV series, also called Star Wars: The Clone Wars? Do the plots overlap at all? How did you try to distinguish or blend the two?
The styles are actually a lot different, although I kept some slight elements of design on some of the characters. Anakin's outfit was inspired by the 2003 series, and I took some of the angles and the graphic look and tried to work it into the more dimensional characters we have. I know a lot of fans liked those shorts so it was an attempt to give a nod to that series within this Clone Wars, but when it comes to the plot and stories there is no direct correlation between the two. The 2003 series was very exaggerated, not just in design but in its storytelling and action. We chose to stay more in the Star Wars universe for our Jedi powers so that The Clone Wars film and TV series will hook up with the live-action movies George made before. We couldn't have a scenario where one Jedi could destroy hundreds of battle droids by himself; it was too superhuman for the drama and vulnerability that we wanted to get across. But it's always exciting to see the work that Star Wars inspires in different artists from comic books, novels, video games, to our own work on this series.

bouts

Consciousness fades during sleep not because the brain shuts down but because it loses its capacity to integrate information via networks of interconnected areas, a new study suggests. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues studied six adults who sat in reclining chairs with their eyes closed and gradually fell asleep. The researchers used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to generate mild magnetic pulses that briefly activated the right-premotor area of each participant's brain. The team targeted that area because it connects to many other parts of the brain.

In volunteers who were awake, magnetic prodding of the premotor area elicited a rise in electrical activity within a fraction of a second, as measured by sensors in a cap worn by each volunteer. Over the next several seconds, brief waves of electrical activity appeared in four other brain regions, the scientists report in the Sept. 30 Science.

During bouts of deep sleep early in the night, the magnetic stimulation induced a stronger initial surge of premotor-electrical activity than had occurred during wakefulness. However, that activity rapidly vanished, and brain regions with premotor connections showed no subsequent signs of arousal.

When the researchers magnetically stimulated tissue in another brain network, neural activity again spread only while participants were awake. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

Tononi's group plans to investigate whether communication across brain regions partly recovers during late-night sleep and especially during periods of rapid eye movement, when dreaming is common.

fossil

Researchers have found fossils from an approximately 9.8 million-year-old ape that lived in eastern Africa. The creature belonged to a new genus, dubbed Nakalipithecus nakayamai, that may have evolved into a common ancestor of African apes and humans, proposes a team led by Yutaka Kunimatsu of Kyoto University in Japan. http://louisyjysheehan.blogspot.com

Fieldwork in Kenya yielded a partial lower jaw containing three teeth as well as a dozen individual teeth, all attributed to Nakalipithecus. http://louisyjysheehan.blogspot.com The fossils were dated by measurements of radioactive-argon decay in volcanic-ash layers at the African site.

The newly unearthed fossils display a few similarities to fossil teeth of a previously reported ape that lived from 9.6 million to 8.7 million years ago in what is now Greece. Kunimatsu's group has yet to compare Nakalipithecus with fossils of a 10 million-year-old ape recently discovered in eastern Africa (SN: 11/3/07, p. 280).

Apes evolved in Africa from 11 million to 5 million years ago, the scientists say in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other investigators speculate that, during that span, European and Asian apes spread into Africa and evolved into various lines of African apes.

warms

Tuatara are often called living fossils—the ancestors of these New Zealand creatures roamed the Earth 200 million ago and survived the extinction event that took down the dinosaurs. http://louis-j-sheehan.com But according to a study released today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the lizard-like animal’s long run might come to a sudden end if the planet warms as rapidly as some fear.

The problem is that tuatara, like a lot of reptiles, show what’s called temperature dependent sex determination, meaning that the sex of a baby animal depends on the temperature during its development. http://louis-j-sheehan.com For the tuatara, scientists say, the critical temperature is close to 71 degrees Fahrenheit. If the mercury reads higher than that during a baby tuatara’s development, it is much more likely to be born a male. So, the researchers say, a warmer world could throw off the male-female balance.

The scientists, led by Nicola Mitchell of the University of Western Australia, chose New Zealand’s North Brother Island as a testing ground and modeled how severe global warming would affect 52 known tuatara nesting sites there. If the Earth keeps warming, they found, tuatara nesting sites will heat up, too, to the point that the number of females will dwindle, decreasing the species’ chance for successful reproduction.

Many animals have sought refuge from global warming by migrating to cooler climates, and, as DISCOVER noted, plants have begun to do the same. But tuatara, stuck on tiny islands, have no way to escape on their own. Severe global warming might make us move people off tropical islands; now we might have to evacuate the reptiles, too.

cannonade

MAY 14TH.—Warm, with alternate sunshine and showers. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com

With the dawn recommenced the heavy boom of cannon down the river. It was rumored this morning that our right wing at Drewry’s Bluff had been flanked, but no official information has been received of the progress of the fight. I saw a long line of ambulances going in that direction.

To-day it is understood that the battle of Petersburg will be fought by Beauregard, if he be not withheld from attacking the enemy by orders from Richmond.

We have been beaten, or rather badly foiled here, by orders from high authority; and it is said Gen. Ransom finds himself merely an instrument in the hands of those who do not know how to use him skillfully.

The enemy is said to have made a bridge across the James River, either to come on the north side, or to enable the raiders to reach them. They are also planting torpedoes, for our iron rams. They are not yet ready.

Gen. Lee is prosecuting the defensive policy effectively. Couriers to the press, considered quite reliable, give some details of a most terrific battle in Spottsylvania County day before yesterday, 12th inst. Our men (with extra muskets) fought behind their breastworks. The host of assailants came on, stimulated by whisky rations, ten deep, and fearful was the slaughter. Their loss is estimated at 20,000; ours, 2000. The enemy were still in front. Grant says he will not recross the Rappahannock as long as he has a man left. Lee seems determined to kill his last man.

A great deal of time is said to have been consumed in cabinet council, making selections for appointments. It is a harvest for hunters after brigadier and major-generalships. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com The President is very busy in this business, and Secretary Seddon is sick—neuralgia. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com

Last night Custis came home on a furlough of twelve hours. He got a clean shirt, and washed himself—not having had his shoes or clothes off for more than a week. He has not taken cold, though sleeping in the water, and not having dry clothes on him for several days. And his appetite is excellent. He departed again for camp, four miles off, at 5½ A.M., bringing and taking out his gun, his heavy cartridge-box, and well-filled haversack (on his return).

Half-past four o’clock P.M. A tremendous cannonade is now distinctly heard down the river, the intonations resembling thunder. No doubt the monitors are engaged with the battery at Drewry’s Bluff. It may be a combined attack.

Gen. Pemberton has resigned his commission; but the President has conferred on him a lieutenant-colonelcy of artillery. Thus the feelings of all the armies and most of the people are outraged; for, whether justly or not, both Pemberton and Bragg, to whom the President clings with tenacity, are especially obnoxious both to the people and the army. May Heaven shield us! Yet the President may be right.

r

May 14, Saturday. http://louis1j1sheehan.usAttended the funeral of Colonel Harris. His death gives embarrassment as to a successor. The higher class of marine officers are not the men who can elevate or give efficiency to the corps. To supersede them will cause much dissatisfaction. Every man who is over-slaughed and all his friends will be offended with me for what will be deemed an insult. But there is a duty to perform.

hardee

Wilber Hardee, a farm boy turned grill cook who went on to open the first Hardee’s hamburger stand in 1960, starting a chain that now has nearly 2,000 restaurants in the United States and overseas, died Friday at his home in Greenville, N.C. He was 89. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Ann Hardee Riggs said.

It was on an empty lot in Greenville, near East Carolina College (now a university), that Mr. Hardee opened that first hamburger stand on Sept. 3, 1960. There was no dining room, no drive-up window. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.deCharcoal-broiled hamburgers and milkshakes sold for 15 cents apiece.

There are now 1,926 Hardee’s restaurants, mostly in the Southeast and the Midwest, most of them franchises of CKE Restaurants, which bought the Hardee’s chain in 1997. Last year, the Hardee’s division, which specializes in Thickburgers weighing from one-third to two-thirds of a pound and costing up to $4.49, had revenue of $1.8 billion.

Although he would hold an interest in more than 80 other restaurants during his career, Mr. Hardee did not make much of a profit as founder of the chain that bears his name. He sold his share in what was then a five-franchise operation in 1963, for $37,000.

“Back in the ’60s, it was pretty good money,” Ann Hardee Riggs said, “but not that much.”

Born in Martin County, N.C., on Aug. 15, 1918, Mr. Hardee was one of five children of Henry and Mary Hardee. Not interested in the family corn and tobacco farm, the young Mr. Hardee got a job as a grill cook at a local eatery. In World War II, he was a Navy cook in the Pacific. While home on furlough in 1945, he married Kathryn Roebuck.

Mr. Hardee’s first wife died in 1980. In 1986, he married Helen Galloway.

In addition to his daughter Ann, Mr. Hardee is survived by his second wife; two daughters from his first marriage, Mary Baker and Becky Eissens; a stepdaughter, Patricia Phelps; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

After World War II, Mr. Hardee returned to Greenville and opened a restaurant; he and his wife lived in the back. By 1960, when he opened his first hamburger stand, Mr. Hardee already owned 15 restaurants.

He took on two partners, Jim Gardner and Leonard Rawls, in 1961. They opened a second Hardee’s, in Rocky Mount, N.C. But difficulties with his partners soon led him to sell his share. Mr. Hardee later started another hamburger chain, called Little Mint, which eventually had about 25 franchised locations in North and South Carolina.

The Hardee’s chain grew by leaps and bounds in the 1970s, helped in part by its jingle: “Hurry on down to Hardee’s, where the burgers are charco-broiled.”

Ann Hardee Riggs said her father had never failed to get a kick out of seeing the red and white sign of the Hardee’s chain. “Anywhere he would go, he was proud to see his name up there,” she said.

prime minister

In 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Zhou assumed the role of Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. In June 1953, he made the five declarations for peace. He headed the Communist Chinese delegation to the Geneva Conference and to the Bandung Conference (1955). http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.comHe survived a covert proxy assassination attempt by the nationalist Kuomintang under the government of Chiang Kai-shek on his way to Bandung. A time bomb with an American-made MK-7 detonator was planted on a charter plane Kashmir Princess scheduled for Zhou's trip. Zhou changed planes but the rest of his crew of 16 people died. Zhou was a moderate force and a new influential voice for non-aligned states in the Cold War; his diplomacy strengthened regional ties with India, Burma, and many southeast Asian countries, as well as African states. In 1958, the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs was passed to Chen Yi but Zhou remained Prime Minister until his death in 1976. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com

Zhou's first major domestic focus after becoming premier was China's economy, in a poor state after decades of war. He aimed at increased agricultural production through the even redistribution of land. Industrial progress was also on his to-do list. He additionally initiated the first environmental reforms in China. In government, Mao largely developed policy while Zhou carried it out.http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com

In 1958, Mao Zedong began the Great Leap Forward, aimed at increasing China's production levels in industry and agriculture with unrealistic targets. As a popular and practical administrator, Zhou maintained his position through the Leap. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a great blow to Zhou. At its late stages in 1975, he pushed for the "four modernizations" to undo the damage caused by the campaigns.

Zhou, shown here with Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong.

Known as an able diplomat, Zhou was largely responsible for the re-establishment of contacts with the West in the early 1970s. He welcomed US President Richard Nixon to China in February 1972, and signed the Shanghai Communiqué.

After discovering he had cancer, he began to pass many of his responsibilities onto Deng Xiaoping. During the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was the new target of Chairman Mao's and Gang of Four's political campaigns in 1975 by initiating "criticizing Song Jiang, evaluating the Water Margin", alluding to a Chinese literary work, using Zhou as an example of a political loser. In addition, the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign was also directed at Premier Zhou because he was viewed as one of the Gang's primary political opponents.

[edit]

ariete Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Eighth Army comprised two Corps: XXX Corps under Lieutenant-General Willoughby Norrie and XIII Corps under Lieutenant-General Reade Godwin-Austen. XXX Corps was made up of British 7th Armoured Division (commanded by Major-General William Gott), South African 1st Infantry Division (newly arrived from the East African Campaign and commanded by Major-General George Brink) and 22nd Guards Brigade. XIII Corps comprised 4th Indian Infantry Division (commanded by Major-General Frank Messervy), the newly arrived the 2nd New Zealand Division (commanded by Major-General Bernard Freyberg) and the 1st Army Tank Brigade. Eighth Army also included the Tobruk garrison where the gallant but exhausted Australian 9th Division under Major-General Leslie Morshead had been replaced by the British 70th Infantry Division, under Major-General Ronald Scobie, and the Polish Carpathian Brigade which were brought in by the Royal Navy. http://louis1j1sheehan.usIn reserve Eighth Army had South African 2nd Infantry Division making a total of 7 divisions with 770 tanks (including many of the new Crusader Cruiser tanks, after which the operation was named, as well as the American light Stuart). Tactical air support was provided by 1,000 planes under the command of Air HQ Western Desert.

Opposing them were the hardened veterans of General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps comprising the 15th Panzer Division, 21st Panzer Division (total of 260 Panzers ) together with the understrength Afrika Division which was redesignated the 90th Light Infantry Division in late November. Supporting them were the Italian Ariete Armoured Division and 6 under-strength Italian infantry divisions (the Savona, Pavia, Trento, Trieste Motorised, Brescia and Bologna divisions) with 154 tanks organized into 3 corps. Rommel had built a defensive line along the escarpment running from near the sea at Sollum towards the Quattara depression inland. The 21st Panzer and Savona divisions manned these defences whilst Rommel kept the rest of his forces grouped near the Tobruk perimeter where a planned attack on November 14 had been put back.^[2] Axis Air support consisted of 120 German and 200 Italian planes.

The plan was to engage the Afrika Korps with the British 7th Armoured Division while the South African Division covered their left flank. Meanwhile, on their right, XIII Corps, supported by 4th Armoured Brigade (detached from 7th Armoured Division), would make a clockwise flanking advance west of Sidi Omar and hold position threatening the rear of the line of Axis defensive strongpoints which ran east from Sidi Omar to the coast at Halfaya. Central to the plan was the destruction of the Axis armour by 7th Armoured Division to allow the relatively lightly armoured XIII Corps to advance north to Bardia on the coast whilst XXX Corps continued northwest to Tobruk and link with a planned breakout by 70th Division. http://louis1j1sheehan.us

Before dawn on 18 November, Eighth Army launched a surprise attack, advancing west from its base at Mersa Matruh and crossing the Libyan border near Fort Maddalena, some 50 miles (80 km) south of Sidi Omar, and then pushing to the northwest. Eighth Army were relying on the Desert Air Force to provide them with two clear days without serious air opposition but torrential rain and storms the night before the offensive resulted in the cancellation of all the air-raids planned to interdict the Axis airfields and destroy their aircraft on the ground.^[3] However, initially all went well for the Allies. 7th Armoured division's 7th Armoured Brigade advanced northwest towards Tobruk with 22nd Armoured Brigade to their left. XIII Corps and New Zealand Division made its flanking advance with 4th Armoured Brigade on its left and 4th Indian Division's 7th Infantry Brigade on its right flank at Sidi Omar. On the first day no resistance was encountered as Eighth Army closed on the enemy positions. http://louis1j1sheehan.us

On the morning of 19 November 22nd Armoured Brigade made contact with the armour of the Ariete Division at Bir el Gubi and a day long battle ensued. In the division's center 7th Armoured Brigade and the 7th Support Group raced forward almost to within sight of Tobruk and took Sidi Rezegh airfield while on the right flank 4th Armoured Brigade came into contact that evening with a force of 60 tanks supported by 88mm gun batteries and anti-tank units^[4] from 21st Panzer Division (which had been moving south from Gambut) and became heavily engaged.^[5]

On 20 November 22nd Armoured Brigade fought a second engagement with the Ariete Division and 7th Armoured Brigade repulsed an infantry counter-attack by the 90th Light and Bologna Divisions at Sidi Rezegh. 4th Armoured Brigade fought a second engagement with 21st Panzer pitting their Stuart tanks' greater speed against the enemy's heavier guns.

Eighth Army were fortunate at this time that 15th Panzer Division had been ordered to Sidi Azeiz where there was no British armour to engage. However, 4th Armoured Brigade soon started to receive intelligence that the two German Panzer divisions were linking up. In his original battle plan Cunningham had hoped for this so that he would be able to bring his own larger tank force to bear and defeat the Afrika Korps armour. However, by attaching 4th Armoured Brigade to XIII Corps, allowing 22nd Armoured Brigade to be sidetracked fighting the Ariete Division and letting 7th Armoured Brigade to forge towards Tobruk, his armoured force was by this time hopelessly dispersed. 22nd Armoured Brigade were therefore disengaged from the Ariete and ordered to move east and support 4th Armoured Brigade (while infantry and artillery elements of 1st South African Division were to hold the Ariete) and 4th Armoured were released from their role of defending XIII Corps' flank.^[6]

In the afternoon of 20 November 4th Armoured were engaged with 15th Panzer Division (21st Panzer having temporarily withdrawn for lack of fuel and ammunition). It was too late in the day for a decisive action but 4th Armoured nevertheless lost some 40 tanks and by this time were down to less than two-thirds their original strength of 164 tanks. 22nd Armoured arrived at dusk, too late to have an impact, and during the night of the 20th Rommel pulled all his tanks northwest for an attack on Sidi Rezegh.

Braun Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 811991

Dr. Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr ('Baron')^[1] von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977), a German physicist and astronautics engineer, became one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the United States. Wernher von Braun is sometimes said to be the preeminent rocket scientist of the 20th century. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In his 20s and early 30s, von Braun was the central figure in Germany's pre-war rocket development program, responsible for the design and realization of the V-2 combat rocket during World War II. After the war, he and some of his rocket team were brought to the United States as part of the then secret Operation Overcast. In 1955, ten years after entering the country, von Braun became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Von Braun worked on the American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program before joining NASA, where he served as director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon.^[2] He is generally regarded as the father of the United States space program, both for his technical and organizational skills, and for his public relations efforts on behalf of space flight. He received the 1975 National Medal of Science.

Wernher von Braun was born in Wirsitz (Wyrzysk), Province of Posen, German Empire. He was born second of three sons. His father, the conservative civil servant Magnus Freiherr von Braun (1877–1972), although never a party politician, served as a Minister of Agriculture in the Federal Cabinet during the Weimar Republic. His mother, Emmy von Quistorp (1886–1959) could trace ancestry through both her parents to medieval European royalty. Von Braun also had a younger brother, also named Magnus Freiherr von Braun, born in 1919. Upon Wernher von Braun's Lutheran confirmation, his mother gave him a telescope, and he discovered a passion for astronomy and the realm of outer space. When Wyrzysk was ceded to Poland in 1918, his family, like many other German families, moved. They settled in Berlin, where the 12-year-old von Braun, inspired by speed records established by Max Valier and Fritz von Opel,^[3] caused a major disruption in a crowded street by firing off a toy wagon to which he had attached a number of fireworks. The youngster was taken into custody by the local police until his father came to collect him.

Starting in 1925 von Braun attended a boarding school at Ettersburg castle near Weimar where at first he did not do well in physics and mathematics. In 1928 his parents moved him to the Hermann-Lietz-Internat (also a residential school) on the East Frisian North Sea island of Spiekeroog, where he acquired a copy of the book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space) by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. The idea of space travel had always fascinated von Braun, and from that point on he applied himself to physics and mathematics in order to pursue his interest in rocketry.

Starting in 1930, he attended the Technical University of Berlin, where he joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR, the "Spaceflight Society") and assisted Hermann Oberth in liquid-fueled rocket motor tests. He also studied at ETH Zurich. Although he worked mainly on military rockets in his later years, space travel remained his primary interest.

[edit] German career

[edit] The Prussian rocketeer

Von Braun was working on his creative doctorate when the National Socialist German Workers Party took over Germany, and rocketry almost immediately became a national agenda. An artillery captain, Walter Dornberger, arranged an Ordnance Department research grant for him, and von Braun then worked next to Dornberger's existing solid-fuel rocket test site at Kummersdorf. He was awarded a doctorate in physics (aerospace engineering) on July 27, 1934 from the University of Berlin for a thesis titled About Combustion Tests; his doctoral advisor was Erich Schumann.^[4] However, this thesis was only the public part of von Braun's work. His actual full thesis, Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket (dated April 16, 1934) was kept classified by the army, and was not published until 1960.^[5] By the end of 1934, his group had successfully launched two rockets that rose to heights of 2.2 and 3.5 kilometers.

At the time, Germany was highly interested in American physicist Robert H. Goddard's research. Before 1939, German scientists occasionally contacted Goddard directly with technical questions. Wernher von Braun used Goddard's plans from various journals and incorporated them into the building of the Aggregat 4 (A-4) series of rockets, better known as the V-2.^[6] In 1963, von Braun reflected on the history of rocketry, and said of Goddard's work: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." ^[3] Goddard confirmed his work was used by von Braun when, after the war ended, Goddard inspected captured German V-2s, and recognized many components which he had invented.^{[citation needed]}

There were no German rocket societies after the collapse of the VFR, and civilian rocket tests were forbidden by the new Nazi regime. Only military development was allowed and to this end, a larger facility was erected at the village of Peenemünde in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea. This location was chosen partly on the recommendation of von Braun's mother, who recalled her father's duck-hunting expeditions there. Dornberger became the military commander at Peenemünde, with von Braun as technical director. In collaboration with the Luftwaffe, the Peenemünde group developed liquid-fuel rocket engines for aircraft and jet-assisted takeoffs. They also developed the long-range A-4 ballistic missile and the supersonic Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile.

In November 1937 (other sources: December 1, 1932), von Braun joined the National Socialist German Workers Party. An Office of Military Government, United States document dated April 23, 1947 states that von Braun joined the Waffen-SS (Schutzstaffel) horseback riding school in 1933, then the National Socialist Party on May 1, 1937 and became an officer in the Waffen-SS from May 1940 until the end of the war.

Amongst his comments about his NSDAP membership von Braun has said:

I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party. At this time (1937) I was already technical director of the Army Rocket Center at Peenemünde ... My refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. Therefore, I decided to join. My membership in the party did not involve any political activities ... in Spring 1940, one SS-Standartenführer (SS Colonel) Müller ... looked me up in my office at Peenemünde and told me that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had sent him with the order to urge me to join the SS. I called immediately on my military superior ... Major-General W. Dornberger. He informed me that ... if I wanted to continue our mutual work, I had no alternative but to join.^{[citation needed]}

That claim has been often disputed because in 1940, the Waffen-SS had shown no interest in Peenemünde yet. Also, the assertion that persons in von Braun's position were pressured to join the Nazi party, let alone the SS, has been disputed. Braun claimed to have worn the SS uniform only once.^[7]. He began as an Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) and was promoted three times by Himmler, the last time in June 1943 to SS-Sturmbannführer (Wehrmacht Major).

Schematic of the A4/V2

On December 22, 1942, Adolf Hitler signed the order approving the production of the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon" and the group developed it to target London. Following von Braun's July 7, 1943 presentation of a color movie showing an A-4 taking off, Hitler was so enthusiastic that he personally made him a professor shortly thereafter.^[8] In Germany and at this time, this was an absolutely unusual promotion for an engineer who was only 31 years old.

By now the British and Soviet intelligence agencies were aware of the rocket program and von Braun's team at Peenemünde. Over the nights of 17 and 18 August 1943 RAF Bomber Commands Operation Hydra despatched raids on the Peenemünde camp consisting of 596 aircraft and dropping 1,800 tons of explosives.^[9] The facility was salvaged and most of the science team remained unharmed, however the raids killed von Braun's engine designer Walter Thiel and Chief Engineer Walther, and the rocket program was delayed.^[10][11]

See also: Bombing of Peenemünde in World War II

The first combat A-4, renamed the V-2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2 "Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2") for propaganda purposes, was launched toward England on September 7, 1944, only 21 months after the project had been officially commissioned. Von Braun's interest in rockets was specifically for the application of space travel, which led him to say on hearing the news from London: "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet." He described it as his "darkest day".^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Slave labor

SS General Hans Kammler, who as an engineer had constructed several concentration camps including Auschwitz, had a reputation for brutality and had originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers in the rocket program. Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the V-2 rocket factory at Peenemünde, endorsed this idea in April 1943 when a labor shortage developed. More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon.^[12] Von Braun admitted visiting the plant at Mittelwerk on many occasions, and called conditions at the plant "repulsive", but claimed never to have witnessed any deaths or beatings, although it had become clear to him by 1944 that deaths had occurred.^[13] He denied ever having visited the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp itself. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Adam Cabala reported:

[...] the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun also saw everything that went on every day. When they walked along the corridors, they saw the prisoners' drudgery, their exhausting work and their ordeal. During his frequent attendance in Dora, Prof. Wernher von Braun never once protested against this cruelty and brutality.^[3]

and

On a little area beside the clinic shack you could see piles of prisoners every day who had not survived the workload and had been tortured to death by the vindictive guards. [...] But Prof. Wernher von Braun just walked past them, so close that he almost touched the bodies.

On August 15, 1944, von Braun wrote a letter to Albin Sawatzki, manager of the V-2 production, admitting that he personally picked labor slaves from the Buchenwald concentration camp, who, he admitted 25 years later in an interview, had been in a "pitiful shape".^[2]

In Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space numerous quotes from von Braun show he was aware of the conditions, but felt completely unable to change them. From a visit to Mittelwerk, von Braun is quoted by a friend:

It is hellish. My spontaneous reaction was to talk to one of the SS guards, only to be told with unmistakable harshness that I should mind my own business, or find myself in the same striped fatigues!... I realized that any attempt of reasoning on humane grounds would be utterly futile. (Page 44)

[edit] Arrest by the Nazi regime

According to André Sellier, a French historian and survivor of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, Himmler had von Braun come to his Hochwald HQ in East Prussia sometime in February 1944. To increase his power-base within the Nazi régime, Heinrich Himmler was conspiring to use Kammler to wrest control of all German armament programs, including the V-2 program at Peenemünde. He therefore recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V-2, but von Braun claimed to have replied that the problems were merely technical and he was confident that they would be solved with Dornberger's assistance.

Apparently von Braun had been under SD surveillance since October 1943. A report stated that he and his colleagues Riedel and Gröttrup were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening that they were not working on a spaceship and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude. A young female dentist had denounced them for their comments. Combined with Himmler's false charges that von Braun was a Communist sympathizer and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, and considering that von Braun was a qualified pilot who regularly piloted his government-provided airplane that might allow him to escape to England, this led to his arrest by the Gestapo. Kammler, highly dedicated to Himmler, is thought to have been instrumental in these activities.

The unsuspecting von Braun was detained on March 14 (or March 15)^[14], 1944 and was taken to a Gestapo cell in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), where he was imprisoned for two weeks without even knowing the charges against him. It was only through the Abwehr in Berlin that Dornberger was able to obtain von Braun's conditional release and Albert Speer, Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, convinced Hitler to reinstate von Braun so that the V-2 program could continue. Citing from the "Führerprotokoll" (the minutes of Hitler's meetings) dated May 13, 1944 in his memoirs, Speer later relayed what Hitler had finally conceded: "In the matter concerning B. I will guarantee you that he will be exempt from persecution as long as he is indispensable for you, in spite of the difficult general consequences this will have."

The Soviet Army was about 160 km from Peenemünde in the spring of 1945 when von Braun assembled his planning staff and asked them to decide how and to whom they should surrender. Afraid of Soviet cruelty to prisoners of war, von Braun and his staff decided to try to surrender to the Americans. Kammler had ordered relocation of von Braun's team into central Germany; however, a conflicting order from an army chief ordered them to join the army and fight. Deciding that Kammler's order was their best bet to defect to the Americans, von Braun fabricated documents and transported 500 of his affiliates to the area around Mittelwerk, where they resumed their work. For fear of their documents being destroyed by the SS, von Braun ordered the blueprints to be hidden in an abandoned mine shaft in the Harz mountain range. ^[15]

While on an official trip in March, von Braun suffered a complicated fracture of his left arm and shoulder when his driver fell asleep at the wheel. His injuries were serious but he insisted that his arm be set in a cast so he could leave the hospital. Due to this neglect of the injury he had to be hospitalized again a month later where his bones had to be re-broken and re-aligned.^[15]

In April, as the allied forces advanced deeper into Germany, Kammler ordered the science team to be moved by train into the town Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps where they were closely guarded by the SS with orders to execute the team if they were about to fall into enemy hands. However, von Braun managed to convince the SS Major Kummer to order the dispersion of the group into nearby villages so that they would not be an easy target for U.S. bombers.^[15]

On May 2, 1945, upon finding an American private from the U.S. 44th Infantry Division, von Braun's brother and fellow rocket engineer, Magnus, approached the soldier on a bicycle, calling out in broken English, "My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender."^[16]

The American high command was well aware of how important their catch was: von Braun had been at the top of the Black List, the code name for the list of German scientists and engineers targeted for immediate interrogation by U.S. military experts. On June 19, 1945, two days before the scheduled handover of the area to the Soviets, US Army Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the US Army Ordnance in London, and Lt Col R. L. Williams took von Braun and his department chiefs by jeep from Garmisch to Munich. The group was flown to Nordhausen, and was evacuated 40 miles southwest to Witzenhausen, a small town in the American Zone, the next day.^[17] Von Braun was subsequently recruited to the U.S. under Operation Overcast.

[edit] American career

[edit] U.S. Army career

On June 20, 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull approved the transfer of von Braun and his specialists to America; however this was not announced to the public until October 1, 1945.^[18] Since the paperwork of those Germans selected for transfer to the United States was indicated by paperclips, the transfer of von Braun and his colleagues became known as Operation Paperclip, an operation that resulted in the employment of many German scientists by the U.S. Army.^[19]

The first seven technicians arrived in the United States at New Castle Army Air Field, just south of Wilmington, Delaware, on September 20, 1945. They were then flown to Boston and taken by boat to the Army Intelligence Service post at Fort Strong in Boston Harbor. Later, with the exception of von Braun, the men were transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to sort out the Peenemünde documents. These would enable the scientists to continue their rocketry experiments.

Finally, von Braun and his remaining Peenemünde staff (see List of German rocket scientists in the United States) were transferred to their new home at Fort Bliss, Texas, a large Army installation just north of El Paso. While there, they trained military, industrial and university personnel in the intricacies of rockets and guided missiles. As part of the Hermes project they helped to refurbish, assemble and launch a number of V-2s that had been shipped from Germany to the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. They also continued to study the future potential of rockets for military and research applications. Since they were not permitted to leave Fort Bliss without military escort, von Braun and his colleagues began to refer to themselves only half-jokingly as "PoPs", "Prisoners of Peace".

A portrait of Maria von Braun, wife of Wernher von Braun.

During his stay at Fort Bliss, von Braun mailed a marriage proposal to 18-year-old Maria Luise von Quistorp, his cousin on his mother's side. On March 1, 1947, having received permission to go back to Germany and return with his bride, he married her in a Lutheran church in Landshut, Germany. He and his bride and his father and mother returned to New York on March 26, 1947. On 9 December 1948, the von Brauns' first daughter, Iris Careen, was born at Fort Bliss Army Hospital. The von Brauns eventually had two more children, Margrit Cécile on May 8, 1952 and Peter Constantine on June 2, 1960. On April 15, 1955, von Braun became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, von Braun and his team were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, his home for the next twenty years. Between 1950 and 1956, von Braun led the Army's rocket development team at Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States.

As director of the Development Operations Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), von Braun, with his team, then developed the Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone rocket. The Jupiter-C successfully launched the West's first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. This event signaled the birth of America's space program.

Despite the work on the Redstone rocket, the twelve years from 1945 to 1957 were probably some of the most frustrating for von Braun and his colleagues. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev and his team of scientists and engineers plowed ahead with several new rocket designs and the Sputnik program, while the American government was not very interested in von Braun's work or views and only embarked on a very modest rocket-building program. In the meantime, the press tended to dwell on von Braun's past as a member of the SS and the slave labor used to build his V-2 rockets.

[edit] Popular concepts for a human presence in space

Repeating the pattern he had established during his earlier career in Germany, von Braun – while directing military rocket development in the real world – continued to entertain his engineer-scientist's dream of a future world in which rockets would be used for space exploration. However, instead of risking being sacked, he now was increasingly in a position to popularize these ideas. The May 14, 1950 headline of The Huntsville Times ("Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon") might have marked the beginning of these efforts. In 1952, von Braun first published his concept of a manned space station in a Collier's Weekly magazine series of articles entitled Man Will Conquer Space Soon! These articles were illustrated by the space artist Chesley Bonestell and were influential in spreading his ideas. Frequently von Braun worked with fellow German-born space advocate and science writer Willy Ley to publish his concepts which, unsurprisingly, were heavy on the engineering side and anticipated many technical aspects of space flight that later became reality.

The space station (to be constructed using rockets with recoverable and reusable ascent stages) would be a toroid structure, with a diameter of 250 feet (76 m), would spin around a central docking nave to provide artificial gravity, and would be assembled in a 1,075 miles (1,730 km) two-hour, high-inclination Earth orbit allowing observation of essentially every point on earth on at least a daily basis. (More than a decade later, the movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey would draw heavily on this design concept in its visualization of the orbital space station.) The ultimate purpose of the space station would be to provide an assembly platform for manned lunar expeditions.

Von Braun envisaged these expeditions as very large-scale undertakings, with a total of 50 astronauts travelling in three huge spacecraft (two for crew, one primarily for cargo), each 49 m long and 33 m in diameter and driven by a rectangular array of 30 jet propulsion engines.^[20] Upon arrival, astronauts would establish a permanent lunar base in the Sinus Roris region by using the emptied cargo holds of their craft as shelters, and would explore their surroundings for eight weeks. This would include a 400 km expedition in pressurized rovers to the Harpalus crater and the Mare Imbrium foothills.

Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun, shown in this 1954 photo holding a model of his passenger ship, collaborated on a series of three educational films.

At this time von Braun also worked out preliminary concepts for a manned Mars mission which used the space station as a staging point. His initial plans, published in The Mars Project (1952), had envisaged a fleet of ten spacecraft (each with a mass of 3,720 metric tons), three of them unmanned and each carrying one 200-ton winged lander^[21] in addition to cargo, and nine crew vehicles transporting a total of 70 astronauts. Gigantic as this mission plan was, its engineering and astronautical parameters were thoroughly calculated. A later project was much more modest, using only one purely orbital cargo ship and one crewed craft. In each case, the expedition would use minimum-energy Hohmann transfer orbits for its trips to Mars and back to Earth.

Before technically formalizing his thoughts on human spaceflight to Mars, von Braun had written a science fiction novel, set in 1980, on the subject. According to his biographer, Erik Bergaust, the manuscript was rejected by no less than 18 publishers. Von Braun later published small portions of this opus in magazines, to illustrate selected aspects of his Mars project popularizations. The complete manuscript did not appear as a printed book until December 2006.^[22]

In the hope that its involvement would bring about greater public interest in the future of the space program, von Braun also began working with Walt Disney and the Disney studios as a technical director, initially for three television films about space exploration. The initial broadcast devoted to space exploration was Man in Space, which first went on air on March 9, 1955.

[edit] Concepts for orbital warfare

Von Braun developed and published his space station concept during the very "coldest" time of the Cold War, when the U.S. government for which he worked put the containment of the Soviet Union above everything else. The fact that his space station – if armed with missiles that could be easily adapted from those already available at this time – would give the United States space superiority in both orbital and orbit-to-ground warfare did not escape him. Although von Braun took care to qualify such military applications as "particularly dreadful" in his popular writings, he elaborated on them in several of his books and articles. This much less peaceful aspect of von Braun's "drive for space" has recently been reviewed by Michael J. Neufeld from the Space History Division of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.^[23]

The U.S. Navy had been tasked with building a rocket to lift satellites into orbit, but the resulting Vanguard rocket launch system was unreliable. In 1957, with the launch of Sputnik 1, there was a growing perception within the United States that America lagged behind the Soviet Union in the emerging Space Race. American authorities then chose to utilize von Braun and his German team's experience with missiles to create an orbital launch vehicle.

NASA was established by law on July 29, 1958. One day later, the 50th Redstone rocket was successfully launched from Johnston Atoll in the south Pacific as part of Operation Hardtack. Two years later, NASA opened the new Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, and the ABMA development team led by von Braun was transferred to NASA. In a face-to-face meeting with Herb York at the Pentagon, von Braun made it clear he would go to NASA only if development of the Saturn was allowed to continue.^[24] Presiding from July 1960 to February 1970, von Braun became the center's first Director.

The Marshall Center's first major program was the development of Saturn rockets to carry heavy payloads into and beyond Earth orbit. From this, the Apollo program for manned moon flights was developed. Wernher von Braun initially pushed for a flight engineering concept that called for an Earth orbit rendezvous technique (the approach he had argued for building his space station), but in 1962 he converted to the more risky lunar orbit rendezvous concept that was subsequently realized.^[25] His dream to help mankind set foot on the Moon became a reality on July 16, 1969 when a Marshall-developed Saturn V rocket launched the crew of Apollo 11 on its historic eight-day mission. Over the course of the program, Saturn V rockets enabled six teams of astronauts to reach the surface of the Moon.

During the late 1960s, von Braun played an instrumental role in the development of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. The desk from which he guided America's entry in the Space Race remains on display there.

During the local summer of 1966/67, von Braun participated in a field trip to Antarctica, organized for him and several other members of top NASA management.^[26] ([1] Photo of von Braun at South Pole]) The goal of the field trip was to determine whether the experience gained by US scientific and technological community during the exploration of Antarctic wastelands would be useful for the manned exploration of space. Von Braun was mainly interested in management of the scientific effort on Antarctic research stations, logistics, habitation and life support, and in using the barren Antarctic terrain like the glacial dry valleys to test the equipment that one day would be used to look for signs of life on Mars and other worlds.

In an internal memo dated January 16, 1969^[27] von Braun had confirmed to his staff that he would stay on as a Center Director at Huntsville to head the Apollo Applications Program. A few months later, on occasion of the first moon-landing, he publicly expressed his optimism that the Saturn V carrier system would continue to be developed, advocating manned missions to Mars in the 1980s. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

However, on March 1, 1970, von Braun and his family relocated to Washington, D.C., when he was assigned the post of NASA's Deputy Associate Administrator for Planning at NASA Headquarters. After a series of conflicts associated with the truncation of the Apollo program, and facing severe budget constraints, von Braun retired from NASA on May 26, 1972. Not only had it became evident by this time that his and NASA's visions for future U.S. space flight projects were incompatible; it was perhaps even more frustrating for him to see popular support for a continued presence of man in space wane dramatically once the goal to reach the moon had been accomplished.

After leaving NASA, von Braun became Vice President for Engineering and Development at the aerospace company, Fairchild Industries in Germantown, Maryland on July 1, 1972.

In 1973 a routine health check uncovered kidney cancer which during the following years could not be controlled by surgery.^[29] Von Braun continued his work to the degree possible, which included accepting invitations to speak at colleges and universities as he was eager to cultivate interest in human spaceflight and rocketry, particularly with students and a new generation of engineers.

On one such visit in the spring of 1974 to Allegheny College, von Braun revealed a more personal, down-to-earth side of himself as a man in his early 60s, beyond the public persona most saw, including an all-too-human allergy to feather pillows and a subtle, if not humorous disdain for some rock music of the era.

Von Braun helped establish and promote the National Space Institute, a precursor of the present-day National Space Society, in 1975, and became its first president and chairman. In 1976, he became scientific consultant to Lutz Kayser, the CEO of OTRAG, and a member of the Daimler-Benz board of directors. However, his deteriorating condition forced him to retire from Fairchild on December 31, 1976. When the 1975 National Medal of Science was awarded to him in early 1977 he was hospitalized, and unable to attend the White House ceremony. On June 16, 1977, Wernher von Braun died in Alexandria, Virginia at the age of 65. He was buried at the Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia. ^{[30] [31]}

[edit] Published works

• First Men to the Moon, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1958). Portions of work first appeared in This Week Magazine.
• Project Mars: A Technical Tale, Apogee Books, Toronto (2006). A previously unpublished science fiction story by Dr. von Braun. Accompanied by paintings from Chesley Bonestell and von Braun's own technical papers on the proposed project.
• The Voice of Dr. Wernher von Braun, Apogee Books, Toronto (2007). A collection of speeches delivered by von Braun over the course of his career.

[edit] Quotations

Upon surrendering with his rocket team to the Americans in 1945: "We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured."^[32]

"All of man's scientific and engineering efforts will be in vain unless they are performed and utilized within a framework of ethical standards commensurate with the magnitude of the scope of the technological revolution. The more technology advances, the more fateful will be its impact on humanity."

"If the world's ethical standards fail to rise with the advances of our technological revolution, the world will go to hell. Let us remember that in the horse-and-buggy days nobody got hurt if the coachman had a drink too many. In our times of high-powered automobiles, however, that same drink may be fatal...."^[33]

On Adolf Hitler: "I began to see the shape of the man – his brilliance, the tremendous force of personality. It gripped you somehow. But also you could see his flaw — he was wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god, the only authority he needed."^[34]

"Religion and science are sisters: the one seeks knowledge of creation and the other of the Creator." (attributed)

[edit] Honors

In February 1970, Huntsville, Alabama, honored Wernher von Braun's years of service with a series of events including a plaque in his honor. Pictured (left to right), his daughter Iris, wife Maria, U.S. Senator John Sparkman, Alabama Governor Albert Brewer, Dr. von Braun, son Peter, and daughter Margrit.

• Elected Honary Fellow of the B.I.S. in 1949^[35]
• Deutsches Bundesverdienstkreuz in 1959
• Smithsonian Langley Medal in 1967
• NASA Distinguished Service Medal in 1969
• National Medal of Science in 1975
• Werner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1975

[edit] Posthumous recognition and critique

Grave of Wernher von Braun in Ivy Hill Cemetery (Alexandria, Virginia)

• Apollo space program director Sam Phillips was quoted as saying that he did not think that America would have reached the moon as quickly as it did without von Braun's help. Later, after discussing it with colleagues, he amended this to say that he did not believe America would have reached the moon at all.
• The von Braun crater on the moon was so named by the IAU in recognition of von Braun's contribution to space exploration and technology.
• Von Braun received a total of 12 honorary doctorates, among them (on January 8, 1963) one from the Technical University of Berlin from which he had graduated.
• Von Braun was responsible for the creation of the Research Institute at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. As a result of his vision, the university is one of the leading universities in the nation for NASA-sponsored research. The building housing the university's Research Institute was named in his honor, Von Braun Research Hall, in 2000.
• Several German cities (Bonn, Neu-Isenburg, Mannheim, Mainz), and dozens of smaller towns, have named streets after Wernher von Braun. Remarkably, all these places are situated in Germany's Southwest and South - the American and French parts of the Allied occupation zones. There seem to be no von Braun streets in the northern parts of the former Federal Republic of Germany, which were occupied by the British. Having had London suffer from his rockets, it is quite understandable that the United Kingdom would have discouraged German attempts at honoring von Braun. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
  
• The Von Braun Center (built 1975) in Huntsville, Alabama is named in von Braun's honor.
• Scrutiny of von Braun's use of forced labor at the Mittelwerk intensified again in 1984 when Arthur Rudolph, one of his top affiliates from the A-4/V2 through to the Apollo projects, left the United States and was forced to renounce his citizenship in front of the alternative of being tried for war crimes.^[36]
• A science- and engineering-oriented Gymnasium in Friedberg, Bavaria was named after Wernher von Braun in 1979. In response to rising criticism, a school committee decided in 1995, after lengthy deliberations, to keep the name but "to address von Braun's ambiguity in the advanced history classes."

[edit] Cultural references

[edit] On film and television

Wernher von Braun has been featured in a number of movies and television shows or series about the Space Race:

• I Aim at the Stars (1960), also titled Wernher von Braun and Ich greife nach den Sternen ("I reach for the stars"): von Braun played by Curd Jürgens). Satirist Mort Sahl suggested the subtitle "(But Sometimes I Hit London)".
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964): Dr Strangelove is usually held to be based at least partly on von Braun.
• Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) (1977): Director and star Kidlat Tahimik is president of a Wernher von Braun club and is fascinated with "First World" progress, particularly von Braun's efforts in the U.S. space program.
• Mobile Suit Gundam (1979): The largest Lunar city in the Universal Century era is called 'Von Braun City'. The city is the home of Anaheim Electronics, is a strategic point in space, and is built around Neil Armstrong's footprint in the Apollo missions.
• The Right Stuff (1983): The Chief Scientist, played by Scott Beach, was clearly modeled on von Braun.
• Back to the Future Part III (1990): Emmett "Doc" Brown reveals that when his Family emigrated to the US, they were originally called "von Braun".
• From the Earth to the Moon (TV, 1998): von Braun played by Norbert Weisser.
• October Sky (1999): In this film about American rocket scientist Homer Hickam, who as a teenager admired von Braun, the scientist is played by Joe Digaetano.
• Space Race (TV, BBC co-production with NDR (Germany), Channel One TV (Russia) and National Geographic TV (USA), 2005): von Braun played by Richard Dillane.
• Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965, directed by Jean-Luc Godard): Howard Vernon plays Professor Von Braun (also known as Leonard Nosferatu), the inventor of the "Alpha 60" super-computer which rules Alphaville.
• "Race to Space" (2001) James Woods portrays a character that the film's director states was "clearly modeled" after von Braun, working on the Mercury program sending the first chimp "Ham" (renamed Mac) into space.
• Planetes (2003): The von Braun is the ship built to make the first manned voyage to the Jovian system. Additionally, the character Wernher Locksmith, the director of the mission, is possibly based on von Braun.
• Alien Planet (TV, 2005): A spacecraft, named VonBraun, is named after him.
• Wernher von Braun - Rocket Man for War and Peace A three part (part1, part 2, part 3) documentary - in English - from the German International channel DW-TV DW-TV.Original German version Wernher von Braun - Der Mann für die Wunderwaffenby the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk.

[edit] In print media

• In an issue of Mad Magazine in the late 1950s, artist Wallace Wood depicted von Braun at the launch of a rocket, ready to listen to a radio transmitting the rocket's signals. Suddenly he says, "HIMMEL! Vas ist los?" and then explains, "Vat iss wrong is vit der RADIO! It iss AC...und der control room iss DC!"

• In Warren Ellis' graphic novel Ministry of Space, Von Braun is a supporting character, settling in Britain after WWII, and being essential for the realization of the British Space Program.

• In the Robotech comics by DC/Wildstorm, Dr. Emil Lang, said to be the chief pioneer of Earth based Robotechnology, has been compared favorably to Von Braun. Notably, Dr. Lang is also German.

[edit] In novels

• The Good German by Joseph Kanon. Von Braun and other scientists are said to have been implicated in the use of slave labour at Peenemünde; their transfer to the US forms part of the narrative.

• Space by James Michener. Von Braun and other German scientists are brought to the US and form a vital part of the US efforts to reach space.

• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. The plot involves British intelligence attempting to avert and predict V-2 rocket attacks. The work even includes a gyroscopic equation for the V2. The first portion of the novel, "Beyond The Zero," begins with a quote from Von Braun: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death."

• New Dictionary, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut in his collection Welcome to the Monkey House notes Von Braun as one of the things an old dictionary doesn't mention.

• Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut has a scene in which a character reads a Life magazine with Von Braun on the cover.

• Seven Ancient Wonders by Matthew Reilly. The plot involves Nazis such as Hans Koeing and also mentions Von Braun.

[edit] In music

• Wernher von Braun (1965): A song written and performed by Tom Lehrer for an episode of NBC's American version of the BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was; the song was later included in Lehrer's album That Was The Year That Was. It was a satire on what some saw as von Braun's cavalier attitude toward the consequences of his work in Nazi Germany: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun."

• The Last Days of Pompeii (1991): A rock opera by Grant Hart's post-Hüsker Dü alternative rock group Nova Mob, in which von Braun features as a character. The album includes a song called Wernher von Braun.

• Progress vs. Pettiness (2005): A song about the Space Race written and performed by The Phenomenauts for their CD Re-Entry. The song begins: "In 1942 there was Wernher von Braun..."

• John D. Loudermilk's song He's Just A Scientist (That's All) contains the lyric "Everybody's flippin' over Fabian or Frankie Avalon, but nobody ever seems to give a flip over Dr Werner Von Braun."

• The song "Apollo XI/V1/V2/Aggregat 4" from German Electro band Welle:Erdball deals with his inventions.

[edit] In computer games

• In the 1999 PC game System Shock 2, the main starship is named the Von Braun.
• In the 2004 Playstation 2 game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the character of Nikolai Sokolov portrays many parallels to von Braun, including his CIA-aided defection to the United States, and famed contributions to rocket science. This may however, be a reference to Korolev, considered by many to be the equivalent of Von Braun in the Soviet space project.