From the S&S archives:
Von Braun discusses hopes for manned spaceflight

STUTTGART, Germany — The man who helped to develop the V2 rocket for Hitler said the U.S. Army plans to start firing a rocket next year that eventually will carry a man into space.

Speaking at the airport here, Wernher von Braun said the Army expects to launch a missile called the Saturn early next year and that plans call for the missile later to be manned and able to make the trip to the moon and back.

Von Braun, director of the developmental operations division of the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency at Huntsville, Ala., said the 200-foot, four-stage missile will have to be fired into space in gradual stages before launching a man into space.

"we hope that w can send the saturn out on orbit stations the beginning of next year," he said, adding the first flight of the big missile would use only the first stage of the four stages available.

The Saturn is designed to carry one man lying on his back on a special couch built to keep him from being tossed around inside the space vehicle.

If something goes wrong, the space expert said, the man can hit what von Braun called the "panic button" and parachute out of the missile.

Von Braun visualized the time when there woyld be regular landing places on the moon but pointed out that the temperature, hardness of the moon's surface and whether the moon or sections of it are radioactive will have to be determined.

Asked about cooperation with the Russians in space research, von Braun noted that cooperation goes only as far as it concerns measurements in space. During the International Geophysical Year, he said, American experts were able to speak to some of the Russians who were building the Sputniks.

But all the information the Americans could get from the Russians concerned measurements and nothing at all about Russian missiles or satellites.

He also said that the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force are not duplicating effort on their respective missile programs.

Von Braun arrived here Thursday from Munich, where he had been visiting his parents. He was introduced here by George Madelung, an official of a German research firm. Madelung recalled that 19 years ago von Braun had developed a rocket for use as a parachute opener but had problems when his rocket passed out of sight into the air and made careful observation impossible.

He's come a long way since then, it was noted.