“What he was trying to do was lay out an architecture for how spaceflight might be possible,” explains Michael Neufeld, senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and author of three books and numerous articles on von Braun. “He was obsessed with the Moon, that was his childhood ambition.”

“The plan was very influential in the 60s and it lived on,” Neufeld says. “When going straight to the Moon became the project he was enthused by that and didn’t necessarily adhere to this rigid shuttle, Moon, Mars scheme but for a lot of engineers at Nasa that was the logical programme for human space exploration.”

Shuttle without a station

Throughout the 1960s, von Braun pursued the development of the giant Saturn 5 rocket that would take men to the Moon. But, in the minds of some in the American space agency, this was just a diversion.

“Nasa kept trying to come back to the script,” says Neufeld. “At the end of the 60s, the Space Task Group tried to recommend to [President] Nixon that we need to build a space shuttle and a space station and then we’ll prepare for expeditions back to the Moon and onto Mars.”