Note: Only forum leaders may delete posts.
*HTML is ON *UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend
Smilies Legend
[i]Every day this week, Mike Wright is reading the mind of the late Dr. Wernher von Braun during the crucial period when he oversaw virtually every detail of the effort to put U.S. American footprints on lunar soil. Wright, the chief historian for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, is working in a gray room in the National Archives Southeast Region near Atlanta, putting thousands of pages of von Braun's "Monday notes" into a computer. Every week, as von Braun oversaw the development of the Saturn V moon rocket, he got a set of short reports from the engineers and administrators under him. He would read them, write in the margins, sign a "B" and the date, then send them back. They came to be known as the "Monday notes," Wright said, and have been hailed as a model of effective communication and management for big projects like Apollo. A full collection of the notes from those years, complete with von Braun's comments and instructions, would detail the history of America's space program in a unique and valuable way, Wright said. But no such compilation was thought to have survived. Since von Braun left Marshall in 1970, thousands of boxes of the center's records have gone to the National Archives Southeast Region for posterity. Regional Administrator James McSweeney said a set of what was thought might be the famed notes was uncovered as archivists pored though materials to help mark NASA's 50th anniversary this year. Wright emphasized that work on the papers is just beginning, and they won't be organized for use by researchers or curious students for some time.[/i]
Contact Us | The Source for Space History & Artifacts
Copyright 1999-2024 collectSPACE. All rights reserved.