Additional Reading & Watching

by Frederick L. Ordway III and Mitchell Sharpe

Purchased by playwright Crystal Skillman at the Air and Space Center, which inspired the play.

A complete history of the von Braun team, this biography covers the group of scientists and engineers who led the United States’ development of rocket science and technology from the end of World War II to the end of the space race. Responsible for developing and engineering the rockets behind Projects Mercury, Project Gemini, and Project Apollo, this is the only authoritative account of the Rocket Team. The accompanying DVD includes rare historical footage of many prominent figures from the space race era.  

From the Earth to the Moon is an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. This edition combines that novel with his sequel, A Trip Round It. It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad cannon and launch three people—the Gun Club’s president, his Philadelphian armor-making rival, and a French poet—in a projectile with the goal of a moon landing. The book is filled with Verne’s calculations on the requirements for the cannon and his analysis of what would happen in such a flight. His vision was finally realized 100 years later when astronauts landed on the moon.

The “remarkable” story of America's secret post-WWII science programs (The Boston Globe), from the New York Times bestselling author of Area 51. 

In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich's scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis' once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States.

“Chasing the Moon,” a film by Robert Stone, reimagines the race to the moon for a new generation, upending much of the conventional mythology surrounding the effort. The series recasts the Space Age as a fascinating stew of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle, visionary impulses and personal drama. Utilizing a visual feast of previously overlooked and lost archival material — much of which has never before been seen by the public — the film features a diverse cast of characters who played key roles in these historic events. Among those included are astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman and Bill Anders; Sergei Khrushchev, son of the former Soviet premier and a leading Soviet rocket engineer; Poppy Northcutt, a 25-year old “mathematics whiz” who gained worldwide attention as the first woman to serve in the all-male bastion of NASA’s Mission Control; and Ed Dwight, the Air Force pilot selected by the Kennedy administration to train as America’s first black astronaut.

Companion book also available: Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise That Launched America into the Space

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

In mid-1943 Nazi Germany entered a crisis from which it was to emerge vanquished. Faced with a shortage of manpower in armaments factories, the Third Reich sent concentration camp prisoners to work as slaves. While the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies continued at extermination camps, numerous outside "Kommandos" were set up in the vicinity of the large concentration camps. The Dora Camp, located in the center of Germany, was one of the most notorious.

Project Mars - A Technical Tale by Wernher von Braun, translated by Henry J. White, written 1948 and published in translation in 1953. A Science Fiction story encapsulating calculations and arguments to show practicality of manned missions to Mars and a Mars colony. With colour illustrations and a technical appendix.

Chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich and one of the fathers of the U.S. space program, Wernher von Braun is a source of consistent fascination. Glorified as a visionary and vilified as a war criminal, he was a man of profound moral complexities, whose intelligence and charisma were coupled with an enormous and, some would say, blinding ambition. Based on new sources, Neufeld's biography delivers a meticulously researched and authoritative portrait of the creator of the V-2 rocket and his times, detailing how he was a man caught between morality and progress, between his dreams of the heavens and the earthbound realities of his life.

This thought-provoking study by historian Monique Laney focuses on the U.S. government–assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community soon after World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the recent Nazi war effort, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA’s space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, and  by the rocketeers’ families, co-workers, friends, and neighbors, Laney’s book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country’s own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.

Willy Ley inspired young rocket scientists and would-be astronauts around the world to imagine a future of interplanetary travel long before space shuttles existed. This is the first biography of the science writer and rocketeer who predicted and boosted the rise of the Space Age. Born in Germany, Ley became involved in amateur rocketry until the field was taken over by the Nazis. He fled to America, where he forged a new life as a weapons expert and journalist during World War II and as a rocket researcher after the war.

A 288-page illustrated and hand-lettered visual memoir on a German family’s memory of WWII.

Belonging wrestles with the idea of Heimat, the German word for the place that first forms us, where the sensibilities and identity of one generation pass on to the next. In this highly inventive visual memoir—equal parts graphic novel, family scrapbook, and investigative narrative—Nora Krug draws on letters, archival material, flea market finds, and photographs to attempt to understand what it means to belong. A wholly original record of a German woman’s struggle with the weight of catastrophic history, Belonging is also a reflection on the responsibility that we all have as inheritors of our countries’ pasts.