On May 2, 1945, just a few days before World War II ended and two days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun and his team of engineers surrendered to American soldiers.

“The grizzled GIs who received von Braun’s surrender were skeptical of the urbane, self-assured German’s claims,” write Emily Carney and Bruce McCandless III in their new book, “Star Bound: A Beginner’s Guide to the American Space Program, from Goddard’s Rockets to Goldilocks Planets and Everything in Between” (University of Nebraska Press), out now. He claimed to be Hitler’s leading rocket scientist, the man who invented the V-2, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.

As one soldier recalled thinking, “If we hadn’t caught the biggest scientist in the Third Reich, we had certainly caught the biggest liar!” But they took him into custody anyway, and brought him back to the United States where he was not only free to continue his research, but would become “crucial to the development of the American space program,” the authors write.

When we think of space exploration, the first names that come to mind are usually icons like John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin, the pioneers who became the public faces of our cosmic ambitions. But there were other trailblazers who were just as important. “The story of space exploration is weirder and more compelling than you’ve been led to believe,” write Carney and McCandless.

Although Von Braun was an officer in the German Schutzstaffel, or SS, he often claimed he only did so to avoid imprisonment. In fact, in March of 1944, Nazi officials tried to prosecute him for “wanting to build a rocket that could reach the moon, rather than Mons (the city in Belgium),” write the authors.

Von Braun wasn’t the only Nazi rocket scientist recruited after the war. Operation Paperclip, a secret American program designed to “secure as much of the dark magic of the Nazi rocket program as they could,” write the authors, resulted in the postwar employment of more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians.

They included men like Kurt Debus, a former SS officer and the future first director of launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center, who “traded his death’s-head insignia for a fridge full of Bud and a pair of bowling shoes,” write Carney and McCandless. And Arthur Rudolph, who helmed the Saturn V development project at Marshall Space Center before being investigated for war crimes. And Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the “father of space medicine” who helped design the first pressure suits for astronauts and also allegedly participated in human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp.

The decision to hire onetime Nazis as rocket scientists rather than put them on trial was a tactical risk, but benefited the needs of America’s space pioneers. “The German’s Jupiter-C launch vehicle, the grandchild of the V-2, lifted America’s first satellite into orbit,” the authors write. Von Braun, with his movie star good looks and enthusiasm for all things America, became a “famously debonair emissary from the future.” He rubbed elbows with Walt Disney on national TV, presenting his plans for America’s inevitable trip to space, and became the chief architect of the Apollo Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969.

While reformed Nazis played a pivotal role in getting us into space, the United States “wasn’t starting from scratch in its postwar rocketry work,” write the authors. Frank Malina and his team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology, Jack Parsons and Ed Forman, were already developing a liquid-fueled launch vehicle for the army. They were given the unofficial name “the Suicide Squad,” thanks to several explosions caused by their rocket experiments, and having almost destroyed the lawn in front of Caltech’s Gates Chemistry Lab.

The trio called themselves the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, using the word “jet” because “rocketry was still a fringe pursuit,” the authors write. Today, the JPL is NASA’s only federally-funded research and development center, and has sent rovers to Mars, among other deep-space robotic spacecrafts.

Jack Parsons, the JPL co-founder who developed the first rocket propelled by either solid or liquid fuel, “specialized in blowing things up,” the authors write. He also drank to excess and experimented with drugs, and dabbled in occult rituals when not working in the lab. One colleague complained that Parsons had “opened a door to the underworld as a result of one of his arcane rituals,” writes Carney and McCandless. 

Several members of the Suicide Squad were investigated by the FBI for their extracurricular activities. Malina was suspected of being a member of the Community Party, and Parsons for his involvement with a “black magic cult.” Fitting his reputation, he died in 1952 at the age of 37, caused by a rocket experiment gone awry. 

Their combined efforts resulted in one of the most historic moments of the 20th century, the moon landing in 1969. But after several years of NASA missions, the late 70s saw a dearth of crewed space flights. Fortunately, a new generation of space innovators was already on the horizon, and they believed that the government “wasn’t the best way to get important things done,” write the authors.

It began with David Hannah, a middle-aged Houston real estate investor who had never shown much interest in space exploration, at least until reading a 1976 story in Smithsonian Magazine about American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. 

“O’Neill wrote about his ideas for mining ores on the moon and the ways in which massive, self-sustaining, solar-powered sky cities could be constructed, maintained, and populated,” write Carney and McCandless. “Humankind was killing [Earth] through overpopulation, pollution, and rapid consumption of its natural resources. To save the planet and ourselves, we needed to take to the heavens.”

Hannah became convinced that O’Neill, and possibly God, had ordained him to build rockets. He founded (and financed) Space Services, Inc. of America (SSIA), and in September of 1982, they launched the Conestoga 1 rocket — with parts purchased from NASA — from a cow pasture on the Texas Gulf Coast. It reached an altitude of 192 miles before falling back to Earth, making it the first private company to put a rocket into space. It was, as one observer described it, the “Kitty Hawk of the commercial space industry.”

During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, NASA “finally moved to encourage entrepreneurial space operations in a big way through milestone-based contracts for development of commercial space vehicles,” write the authors. From Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos, the future of space exploration (and colonization) belongs to wealthy entrepreneurs. Last September, tech billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first-ever non-astronaut to take a spacewalk, and in December he was nominated by Trump to lead NASA.

To Carney and McCandless, this makes perfect sense. “Rockets, it turns out, run mostly on money,” they write. The United States should be supporting any and all efforts to become a spacefaring nation — “and ideally, the preeminent spacefaring nation, as Great Britain was the preeminent seafaring power of the nineteenth century,” they write  — and to do that, we need to recognize that the space exploration is no longer the wild, unrealistic fantasy it was during the mid-20th century, when only Nazi scientists and occult-practicing drunkards dared dream of conquering it.

“Space is here,” they write. “We’re in it. The question is, what do we do with it?”

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