American Genius (2015) s01e05 Episode Script

We have ignition sequence start.
The engines are armed.
Four, three, two, one, zero.
We have liftoff.
Man's conquest of space was born out of war and a rivalry between two superpowers: - Is it confirmed? - Yeah.
The United States and the Soviet Union.
It's amazing.
Two nations, racing to create powerful weapons, with a longer, more destructive reach.
- WE CAN REACH WESTERN EUROPE.
- WHAT ABOUT AMERICA? But the battle to build a better rocket pushed man where he'd never gone before.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
In the closing days of the Second World War, American forces seize Germany from the west, while the Soviet Union charges from the east.
In there.
Stay alert.
The two allies are in a race to get their hands on the Nazis' most powerful weapon, a long-range rocket known as the V-2.
The V-2 rocket was invented as a Hitler terror weapon.
It could fly about two hundred miles in any direction.
The V-2 was capable of going into space-the first thing ever created by humans that could actually get high enough to go into space, so technologically a huge advance of what rockets could do.
The only thing the Allies want more than the powerful V-2 is the genius who created it: German scientist Wernher Von Braun.
Even though he's the Nazis' top rocket designer, Von Braun's real ambitions have never been about war, but about space.
Von Braun's passion was making humans a space-faring species.
He firmly believed that humans should be leaving the planet and exploring other worlds, and, and he was convinced that we had the wherewithal to do that for the first time in history.
By collaborating with the Nazis, Von Braun has been able to finance his experiments with rocketry.
Wernher Von Braun was fanatically driven by this vision that he had, uh, of space travel.
And this was a very expensive hobby.
Really, only the military and governments could finance this dream of his.
And so for him, he would have sold his soul to just about anybody.
But his V-2 is not enough to save the Reich.
Just weeks after the last rocket is launched, the U.
S.
Army pushes deep into the German heartland.
Their search for the V-2 technology leads to a concentration camp called Mittelbau-Dora.
You two, in there.
You two, scour that building.
But as horrific a discovery as it is, the camp hides another secret.
Colonel, we found something! A vast, underground V-2 factory only recently abandoned.
From the depths of this living hell, the Americans have beat the Soviets to the punch.
Open it up! They have everything they need to produce the V-2 everything, except Von Braun.
But the Americans are in for another surprise.
I have information that would be of interest to you.
In exchange I want assurances for me and my team.
Von Braun saw America for what it was, which was a very, very deep pocket and purse.
Only the United States could afford to pick up the tab for his dream of space travel.
His dream of building rockets that could escape Earth's gravity.
The U.
S.
government is now in possession of the world's most sought-after rocket scientist leaving the Soviets to hunt for any scraps the Nazi rocket makers may have left behind.
Their search team is led by a man who is a brilliant rocket scientist in his own right, Sergei Korolev.
In there.
Anything? Like Von Braun, Korolev was passionately committed to the idea of humans exploring space and going to other worlds.
They were kindred spirits.
Sergei! The Soviets stumble upon a hidden stash of documents and spare parts that the Americans missed.
Now Korolev has the means to build a rocket capable of traveling into space or striking any enemy of the Soviet Union.
MOSCOW, U.
S.
S.
R.
WE CAN REACH WESTERN EUROPE.
WHAT ABOUT AMERICA? Yes.
Warfare has been the mother of many an invention.
And of course, the essence of that is rivalry.
Rivalry between nations, rivalry between superpower blocs have been, let's face it, one of the engines of invention.
In order to make a weapon capable of reaching America, Korolev needs to improve upon the design of the V-2.
The Russians start elongating the rocket, so it can hold more fuel.
Giving it slightly bigger engines.
Designing their own guidance systems.
The V-2 they rechristen the R1.
And then they move to the R2.
And the R3 and the R5.
As Korolev begins to perfect his rocket, the military throws him a new challenge.
The Soviets have just developed a thermonuclear device, over a hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
And they want to put it on a rocket.
Now Korolev's missile will have to somehow carry almost double the payload.
It's a problem that demands a daring innovation.
Korolev's R-7 will be five rockets in one.
Ringing the core will be four powerful booster rockets.
They'll lift the core rocket past the hold of Earth's gravity.
Then, they will be jettisoned, freeing the core to fly to its target.
It's a breakthrough design.
A multi-stage rocket.
But now, Korolev has to build it.
FORT BLISS, TEXAS Your orders are to keep waiting.
While Korolev is advancing rocketry, the man who created the V-2 is getting nowhere.
Wernher Von Braun and a team of German scientists were brought to Texas to a military base and ended up spending five years kept on ice by the American authorities, who said, "Well, we may not need you at this very moment but one day, we will need your services".
Five very frustrating years for Mr.
Von Braun.
Von Braun's dreams of space travel have been grounded.
But he's about to get help from an unlikely source: another visionary named Walt Disney.
In the early days of the race for space, the Soviet Union has the upper hand.
Led by Sergei Korolev, they are developing a multi-stage rocket capable of carrying a nuclear bomb.
Meanwhile in America, German rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun has been kept on the sidelines by the U.
S.
government.
But he isn't willing to sit idly by any longer.
Since no one will listen to him, he turns to sort of the mainstream media.
And he sends out on spec an article to Collier's, which at the time was one of the most popular magazines in the United States.
CROSSING THE LAST FRONTIER BY DR.
WERNHER VON BRAUN Von Braun writes a series of dramatic magazine articles, celebrating space exploration and catching the attention of legendary filmmaker Walt Disney.
Robots.
Driving electric cars.
Flying cars.
No, no, no.
I'm not hearing thrilling.
I'm not hearing inspirational.
It needs to be big.
Disney has been designing a new theme park, called Disneyland and is looking for a way to promote its future-themed Tomorrow land.
Disney is a showman.
Disney sees in Von Braun an effective sales tool to market this new theme park that he is building in the orange groves of California.
Have you ever dreamed of visiting the moon? That dream is about to happen.
Visionaries like the brilliant Dr.
Wernher Von Braun Over 42 million Americans tune in to Von Braun's appearance on Disney's primetime broadcast.
And he hopes it's enough to push America closer to outer space.
It will take five days to travel the 240,000 miles there.
To get to the moon, we will need a spaceship like this one.
BAIKONUR COSMODROME In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev has been developing a multi-stage rocket armed with a nuclear bomb and capable of reaching America.
After years in development, Korolev's R-7 rocket is finally ready for its first launch.
Fitted with a dummy nuclear bomb, the R-7 will attempt to strike a target nearly 4,000 miles away.
The same distance as from Russian soil to Washington, D.
C.
For Korolev, everything is riding on a successful hit.
We made it! Korolev has just built the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, giving the Soviets the ability to launch a nuclear attack on America.
Our assets in the region, what do they say? We'll have new Intel by zero nine hundred.
For U.
S.
president Dwight Eisenhower, the news is a call to arms.
He needs a missile program of his own, but employing the best available scientist would be political suicide.
Von Braun was frozen out of the ICBM program because of his German roots.
Eisenhower was very much on board with the development of missile technology.
But he certainly wanted to avoid any associations with the Germans.
But while the American rocket program is just getting started, the Soviet Union is moving rapidly ahead.
Now that he has a working long-range rocket, Korolev wants to send America a message-in a public display of Soviet superiority-by putting the first satellite into orbit.
Sputnik? Sputnik.
Korolev realized here was an opportunity.
He had a rocket.
He could launch something into space.
And he could beat America.
And he wanted to show what his country could do.
And this was the way to humiliate America.
Sputnik weighs less than 200 pounds, contains only a radio transmitter, thermometers and batteries, and takes just a month to construct.
If Sputnik makes it into orbit, the Soviet Union will be first in space.
Ignition sequence started.
Four, three, two, one.
REDSTONE ARSENAL HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA The Soviets did it! They're in orbit.
- Is it confirmed? - Yeah.
Von Braun was furious.
He fumed when he heard the news-you know, If they'd let us have our way we could have had a satellite up long ago.
U.
S MISSILE EXPERTS SHAKEN BY SPUTNIK While the Soviets kept their previous rocket accomplishments under wraps, they proudly announced Sputnik's triumph, making global headlines EVERY AMERICAN WILL BE AFFECTED SPUTNIL SHADOW SPELLS CRISIS and causing panic in the United States.
Sputnik comes as a tremendous shock to the United States.
It scares the bejesus out of the Pentagon.
The flinging of a satellite into space shows that they have a rocket that is sufficiently powerful to easily cross the Atlantic and slam into any point in the United States.
For the first time in its history, the United States is vulnerable to foreign attack on mainland America.
Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev has launched the world's first satellite, while America's top rocket scientist, German Wernher Von Braun, is forced to watch from the sidelines.
In response to Sputnik, President Eisenhower announces that the U.
S.
will launch their own satellite, but it won't be done by Von Braun.
It will be launched by the United States Navy.
The mission is called Vanguard.
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA DECEMBER 6, 1957 It will be America's first live public launch and the whole world will be watching.
When Vanguard exploded, it was humiliating for America because so many people's hopes and dreams were catching up with the Soviet Union never mind beating them.
And it looked like America was even further behind with this humiliating pad explosion.
It didn't even get off the launch pad.
The Vanguard disaster leaves Eisenhower no option.
If America is ever going to catch up to the Soviets, he needs Wernher Von Braun.
For Von Braun, it's the opportunity he's been waiting a lifetime for.
He and his team get to work on building a rocket equipped to put a satellite into orbit.
It's called the Jupiter-C.
Von Braun is a one-man designing machine, and can look at a rocket from head to toe and know where every single piece fits into the big picture.
He can make adjustments on the fly whereas many others have to go back to the drawing room.
Wernher Von Braun was brilliant.
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA JANUARY 31, 1958 In just five weeks, Von Braun's rocket is ready to put the first U.
S.
satellite in orbit.
If he succeeds, he'll be the hero of the fledgling American space program.
But if he fails, the United States will fall even further behind the Soviets.
Lift-off, we have lift-off.
With the success of the Jupiter-C America is finally in the space race, thanks to Wernher Von Braun.
BAIKONUR COSMODROME But the U.
S.
can't celebrate for long, because the Soviets are already upping the ante.
After a series of successful tests, Korolev is ready to do what he has been dreaming of: put a human being in space.
Vostok 1.
This will take you to space.
Whichever of you I pick.
Whether you come back, I can't guarantee.
For the world's first cosmonaut, he picks their most promising young pilot: Yuri Gagarin.
For the first time, a man is leaving planet Earth and heading to the stars.
It's amazing! What beauty.
Such incredible colors.
I can't imagine what it must be like to look down on Earth for the first time.
Everything is suddenly reduced.
The boundaries that separate us must seem to disappear.
For that brief moment you're not thinking in terms of, are you a Russian? Or are you an American? You're just looking down and just thinking about, we're humans and this is the first time that we have left our bounds.
Getting Gagarin into orbit is a triumph.
Fire-braking rockets.
Bringing him home will not be as easy.
Negative re-entry separation.
Repeat, negative separation! The first man in space might be the last.
Earth's orbit has become the front line of the Cold War.
Led by Sergei Korolev, the Soviets are winning the race.
They've put the first man in space.
But Yuri Gagarin's re-entry capsule fails to completely detach from its service module.
If he can't break free, he'll surely be killed by the extreme heat when he re-enters Earth's atmosphere.
But the cables tethering Gagarin's capsule burn away first, SMELOVKA, RUSSIA APRIL 12, 1961 allowing him to twist free and eject at 23,000 feet.
He's two hundred miles from his targeted landing site, but Gagarin has survived.
In just a hundred and eight minutes, he's traveled over twenty-five thousand miles.
Gagarin is now a national hero.
RED IS FIRST SPACE MAN Less than 5 years after Sputnik, the Soviets have beat the United States to space once again.
REDS ORBIT AND LAND MAN The new American president decides to raise the bar.
REDSTONE ARSENAL MAY 25, 1961 This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
Kennedy realized he had to beat the Soviet Union in something.
And pretty much the next big thing was landing people on the moon.
And all of a sudden, Von Braun had an opportunity.
He realized that he could build that monster rocket, he could have an incredible technological engineering achievement to oversee.
Now Von Braun needs to devise a plan for a lunar mission.
Landing on the moon was largely classical physics.
There's gravity, we're gonna build rockets that can produce this much thrust-and Von Braun had run the numbers.
The moon was achievable.
Von Braun fears a direct launch would be impossible, so he comes up with a way to build a lunar lander in space.
More than a dozen rockets would rendezvous in Earth's orbit, forming a space station, where a large lunar lander would then be constructed.
But as brilliant as Von Braun's concept is, one young engineer has his doubts.
This thing would weigh hundreds of tons.
Could you imagine its fuel demands? I'm sure Von Braun's thought about that.
Tom Kelly is a rising star at Grumman Aircraft, the company contracted to build the lunar lander.
Earth orbit rendezvous is a whole new ballgame from anything we'd done before.
And what Thomas Kelly was saying was, Why are you gonna bring this enormous vehicle down to the surface of the moon? Kelly is determined to find a better way and develops an idea.
Instead of launching into Earth's orbit, Kelly's rocket would enter the moon's orbit where a small landing craft would detach and land on the surface of the moon, then launch back to the mother ship and return to Earth.
It's a plan fraught with risk.
They would have to rendezvous in lunar orbit.
You think rendezvous was scary to people in Earth orbit-well, it was even scarier to think about doing it around the moon.
Kelly is convinced his approach is better, but to prove it, he'll have to go up against the most celebrated rocket scientist in the world Wernher Von Braun.
By the early 1960's, the Soviet Union has taken a commanding lead in the Space Race, launching the first satellite and the first man in orbit.
President Kennedy has set an aggressive goal for America of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
But figuring out how to do it is turning into a battle.
JUNE 1962 We'd argue it's not too late to discontinue Rocket pioneer Wernher Von Braun has staked his reputation on a plan to reach the moon from ships orbiting Earth, but young engineer Tom Kelly favors a lunar orbital approach.
The stakes are enormous.
Failure would be catastrophic.
Gentlemen, lunar orbit rendezvous is not one way to get to the moon; it's the only way.
I have spent the past several years developing an Earth orbit rendezvous approach to landing a man on the moon.
After analyzing proposals of other methods, it is my recommendation that a lunar orbit rendezvous is the most practical solution.
For Von Braun, it's a stunning reversal.
It wasn't what he wanted to do.
But when he realized that this is the way the wind was blowing and he realized that the, the engineering numbers were lining up, he was pragmatic enough to change his mind and realize lunar orbital rendezvous was the only way America was going to do it by the end of the decade, which was the deadline that Kennedy set.
Hello.
Yes.
Yes, yes, thank, thank you very much.
Thank you.
While Von Braun and Kelly start building, the Soviet Union is hardly sitting still.
Korolev lands the first man-made object on the moon, Luna 2, and is closing in on his own plan to land a human.
It wasn't just an offshoot of a military rocketry program.
He was being trusted to do something to get the biggest headline probably ever, which was, Soviet Union lands people on the moon first.
The space race between the superpowers has entered its final and defining chapter.
To get men to the moon, Von Braun will have to build the largest, heaviest and most powerful rocket the world has ever seen.
His answer is the Saturn V, a 363-foot tall rocket that works in three separate stages and will require 5.
6 million pounds of rocket fuel to launch.
On November 9th, 1967, the first full trial of the three-stage rocket is a success but perfecting it will take more than a single test.
Some of the other NASA managers looked at this and realized, This is going to take ten Saturn V launches.
That's not only very expensive but it's going to take a lot of time.
We need to move this forward.
CAPE KENNEDY, FLORIDA With just over a year left until President Kennedy's deadline, NASA decides that in December of 1968 the third test of the Saturn V rocket won't be a test at all but will become Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the moon.
There are very few things that have ever been launched like that.
That's very, very quick on your third launch to trust it.
If Apollo 8 is a failure, America might not reach the moon by the end of the decade.
Five, four, three, two, one.
three, two, one.
We have lift-off.
As Wernher Von Braun's latest Saturn V launches, each stage deploys perfectly.
First stage was very smooth and this one was smoother.
Apollo 8 successfully orbits the moon, and the astronauts are safely returned to Earth.
But Von Braun knows that landing men safely on the lunar surface will be much more dangerous.
The Soviet space program is losing its lead, and now it's lost its leader.
In 1966 Sergei Korolev, the man behind the Soviet Union's historic space accomplishments, dies at the age of 59.
His remains are interred in a place of honor: the wall of the Kremlin.
The Americans are only five months away from their first attempt at an unmanned landing on the moon.
But the Soviets haven't given up the fight, despite the death of their leading rocket scientist.
Vasily Mishin takes over the Soviets' Luna program.
In February 1969, he launches the first test of the N1.
It's the Soviet equivalent of Wernher Von Braun's latest rocket, the Saturn V.
Korolev was such an influential figure and such an incredible motivator that it doesn't seem coincidental that the program was incredibly successful until around the time he died, and then it never really recovered.
Back in the United States, Von Braun and his team continue to rehearse the steps for a lunar landing with Apollo 9 and Apollo 10.
Then, on July 16th 1969, Apollo 11 blasts off-and begins a new chapter in human history.
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins travel three days and 238,000 miles to the moon.
The entire world watches live, as Armstrong and Aldrin begin their final descent to the lunar surface.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".
On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the moon.
People could actually see something happening historically.
You could actually watch Neil Armstrong make those first steps on the moon, live on your television.
And it's something that everybody alive at the time remembers exactly where they were, and what they were doing.
But not everyone is celebrating just yet.
Landing the lunar module is only half the mission.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin still have to blast off from the moon and return home.
The fear that Armstrong and Aldrin may be left on the moon was real enough that a speech was prepared for President Nixon saying something along the lines of: fate has ordained that the men who went to explore the moon in peace are now going to remain on the moon.
Tom Kelly and his team have tested the lunar launch system countless times in the lab.
But if it malfunctions on the moon, it isn't just a problem it's a death sentence.
This is, as one of the astronauts used to call it, a sweaty-palms moment.
There's a real possibility that when it comes time to light the ascent engine it doesn't fire.
Six, five, four, three, two, one.
Armstrong and Aldrin successfully leave the moon and reunite with Collins in lunar orbit.
Apollo 11 is the first of six successful lunar landing missions over the next three and a half years.
In all, 12 Americans will walk on the moon and the United States can claim the greatest prize in the race to conquer space.
If Sergei Korolev had not died, who knows if the Soviets would not have reached the moon first.
His passing was really a crippling blow to the Soviet space program.
They couldn't put a man on the moon.
They couldn't compete with the Americans on that score.
Wernher Von Braun spends the rest of his life introducing a new generation to space travel, developing the concept behind NASA's space-camp program, and helping to establish the National Space Institute.
For decades the United States and the Soviet Union continue their space rivalry.
But during the Cold War, the two superpowers find success in collaboration as well, and Russia and the U.
S.
launch the International Space Station in 1998 furthering man's conquest of the stars.
There's this incredible universe of ours that was always beyond reach.
And that's where the space program changed everything.
It expanded and exploded our horizons.
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