Udet massaged the bridge of his nose, trying to control the irritation that flared within him. We know this. My team at Marshall, and the contractors independently, determined this root cause of the fault within an hour of the malfunction. The Saturn had already been vibrating, from the “stretch,” at three or four cycles a second just after launch. Then one of the Solid Rocket Boosters had started vibrating lengthwise, at about the same frequency. Such oscillations had been observed before. But the coincidence of frequency was unfortunate, for that frequency, as it turned out, had been just right to set up standing waves in the valve system carrying liquid oxygen into the main engines…

We know all this, and we are already working to correct the problem. Have you no more wisdom to add than this, Dr. Dana?

But Dana was continuing; he was describing how some preliminary tests, carried out during the MS-IC’s design stage, had indicated the possibility of a resonant flutter — although no change in the stage’s design had resulted — and he even referred to the problems encountered with the Apollo-N flight, when similar resonance problems had caused that stack to pogo.

That link with the fatal Apollo-N mishap showed Udet clearly which way the report was shaping.

It was ludicrous, of course; anyone who understood anything of the complexity of a ship like a Saturn — with its millions of moving parts — would recognize the impossibility of adjusting the design to counter every possible problem that could be conjured up. There was never the time, or the resources; the realistic way was to balance the risks, and exercise judgment as to what is acceptable, and what must be changed. Why, if one waited for the perfect rocket, one would never fly at all!

Udet felt enormously tired. He was sixty-eight years old. And sometimes — especially since the death of von Braun — he wondered whether the battle was still worth the effort, whether he still had the strength for the endless struggle to convince the Americans to accept the great rockets he was building for them.

Udet had donned something of the mantle of von Braun, since Wernher’s retirement a decade earlier. He had even inherited Wernher’s office, there on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building. But Udet had no pretensions; he knew that he was no substitute for Wernher. The Americans had adored von Braun: they responded to him, Udet thought ungraciously, as they did to evangelists, and the salesmen of cars. And, it seemed, questions about the Germans’ past — possible complicity in “war crimes” during the Peenemьnde period — were irrelevant for Wernher.