Rocket Man.(Wernher von Braun)(Brief biography)

America's long-ago trips to the moon are now remembered mostly amid the knickknackery of eBay, a nostalgia niche for space buffs who might otherwise engross themselves in the relics of radio serials and baseball dynasties. The handful of surviving septuagenarians who actually walked on the lunar surface have little hope of living to see humans land on Mars, even though, as decades pass, such an enterprise continues to be fitfully proclaimed and underfunded. For more than thirty years, manned space flight has been a matter not of exploration but of commuting, frequent-flier mileage interrupted by occasional disaster on the way to or from low earth orbit. Anyone who has ...