Free Strange Angel by George Pendle Page B

would spring to our service if we but called their attention to the possibilities of rockets in an appropriate manner.” They could not have been more wrong. They sought members through advertisements in the pulps and through their own mimeographed “Bulletin of the American Interplanetary Society,” and attracted young enthusiasts like Parsons and Forman, who joined immediately. But they lacked funds and scientific literature, and no matter how hard they tried, they could not interest the wider world in their quest. Most dishearteningly of all, Robert Goddard flatly refused to help them. Goddard had recently gained financial backing for his clandestine rocket from the aeronautically-obsessed Guggenheim family, and such patronage he did not want to be disturbed. So it was that the one man who had more insight into the possibilities of space travel than anyone else would not share details of his work with those who most wanted to make it happen.
    In Germany, the nascent rocketeers were having more luck. The Society for Space Ship Travel, or Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR), was founded in 1927, and was slightly more professional than the AIS, if equally idealistic. The society had been started by an odd assortment of engineers and clergymen interested in space flight, but their early slogans such as, “Help create the spaceship!” quickly drew a membership, particularly among the underemployed engineering community still reeling from the devastating economic aftershocks of the First World War. Most significantly of all, the VfR enticed Professor Hermann Oberth to become its president.
    If one man could be said to have rivaled Goddard for his rocketry skills it was Oberth. Fascinated equally by reincarnation and rocketry, in 1923 he created a stir with the publication of his doctoral thesis
Die Rakete zu den Planetenrämen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space),
which demonstrated through elaborate mathematical proofs that rockets could be built to transport man far beyond the reach of Earth’s gravitational pull. By the time the AIS formed, the VfR already had a
Raketenflug-platz
(a rocket test site) in an abandoned army garrison, and their experiments were well underway. With such future greats as the seventeen-year-old Wernher von Braun (who would eventually develop rockets for America’s manned lunar program) among their ranks, the VfR was the preeminent rocket society of the age.
    Nevertheless, the enthusiasms of its young members, many of whom were still in their teens, often overpowered good science. Like Parsons and Forman, most of them wanted to see their rockets fly. Launchings would take place before designs had been properly calculated, often resulting in chaos. In a 1931 letter to the AIS’s Pendray, Willy Ley, one of the club’s founders and later one of America’s best-known spokesmen for space exploration, told of how the VfR had “destructed a house of police” with a rocket that had gone astray and landed on the roof of the local police station. It prompted a temporary ban on all experiments.
    Curious to learn more about the German experiments that he read of in the AIS’s bulletin, Parsons wrote directly to Wernher von Braun, telling him of his own primitive experiments and asking for more information on building rockets. Ed Forman’s third wife Jeanne remembered how both Parsons and Forman had called Braun by telephone, presumably at Parsons’ grandfather’s expense: “Both of the boys had talked to von Braun many times by telephone, way before he ever came to the U.S. ... They were crazy about von Braun and he was crazy about them, because they were out horsing around with the same stuff.”
    The members of the rocket societies on both sides of the Atlantic were intent on extracting information about experiments and advances through letters and telephone calls. With such a small number of people seriously interested in the science,