The year before he died, there was a motion inside the Ford White House to award Wernher von Braun the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The idea almost passed until one of President Ford’s senior advisers, David Gergen, famously wrote, in a note passed to colleagues, “Sorry, but I can’t support the idea of giving [the] medal of freedom to [a] former Nazi whose V-2 was fired into over [sic] 3000 British and Belgian cities. He has given valuable service to the US since, but frankly he has gotten as good as he has given.” Von Braun was awarded the Medal of Science instead. He died on June 16, 1977. His tombstone, in Alexandria, Virginia, cites Psalm 19:1, invoking God, glory, heaven, and earth.
It would be another eight years before the intrepid CNN reporter Linda Hunt became the first person to crack the pretense of Wernher von Braun. It took a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) record release to reveal Wernher von Braun’s Nazi past.
Dr. Hubertus Strughold, though never as famous as Wernher von Braun, played an equally vital role in the U.S. space program—in the field of medicine. In November 1948, fifteen months after Strughold arrived at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base, he and Commandant Harry Armstrong hosted the first ever U.S. military panel discussion on biology in space. Strughold served as professional adviser to Armstrong at the SAM, and he oversaw the work of approximately thirty-four German colleagues under Operation Paperclip contracts there. Strughold’s broader vision, which he shared with Armstrong, was to create a space medicine program for the U.S. Air Force.
In 1948 the notion of human space flight was still considered science fiction by most. But Strughold’s team had recently conducted a groundbreaking experiment with von Braun’s rocket team at White Sands, the results of which they desired to make public. On June 11, 1948, a nine-pound rhesus monkey named Albert was strapped into a harness inside the nose cone of a V-2 rocket and jettisoned into space. Albert’s pressurized space capsule, its harness and its cage, had been designed by Dr. Strughold and his team. The V-2 rocket carrying Albert traveled to an altitude of 39 miles. Albert died of suffocation during the six-minute flight, but for Dr. Strughold, the monkey’s voyage signified the momentous first step toward human space flight.
Armstrong and Strughold’s biology in space panel was cosponsored by the air surgeon, the National Research Council, and the medical research laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Wright Lab. For the first time ever in America, space medicine was now being looked at as a legitimate military science. Two months later, in January 1949, Armstrong and Strughold decided it was time to seek funding for a new department inside the SAM dedicated solely to researching space medicine. For this, Armstrong later explained, “we needed much larger accommodations, more space and facilities and much more sophisticated research equipment.”
Armstrong traveled to Washington, D.C., to sell the idea to Congress and to explain that he and Dr. Strughold needed between fifteen and twenty years’ lead time to do the necessary research to prepare humans for space travel. Congress approved Armstrong’s idea. “There were no wild headlines,” Armstrong later explained. The Department of Space Medicine at the SAM opened with little fanfare on February 9, 1949. “I appointed myself Director of the new aerospace laboratory… not Dr. Strughold since there were [sic] still some lingering enmity toward the Germans,” Armstrong told an air force historian in 1976. But just a few months after the department officially opened, Armstrong was transferred to the Pentagon to serve as surgeon general of the U.S. Air Force. The man he was replacing was his long-time mentor, Major General Malcolm Grow. Back in Texas, Dr. Strughold was promoted to the position of scientific director of the Department of Space Medicine at SAM.