Von Braun Joins NASA: America's Space Race Ignites

Wernher von Braun, the German rocket engineer who had built the V-2 missiles that terrorized London during World War II, officially became an American space pioneer on October 21, 1959, when President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order transferring him and roughly 4,000 colleagues from the U.S. Army's ballistic missile program to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Von Braun had arrived in the United States in 1945 as part of Operation Paperclip, the secret program that brought more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America ahead of Soviet capture. For fourteen years he worked under Army auspices at Fort Bliss, Texas, and then the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, developing intermediate-range ballistic missiles while lobbying relentlessly for a civilian space program. His team had launched America's first satellite, Explorer I, in January 1958 using a modified Redstone rocket, partly redeeming national pride after the Sputnik shock. The transfer brought von Braun's group and their facilities under NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, with von Braun as its first director. He immediately began work on the Saturn family of launch vehicles, the heavy-lift rockets that would eventually carry astronauts to the Moon. His engineering philosophy of exhaustive testing and conservative reliability margins shaped NASA's entire approach to human spaceflight. Von Braun's dual legacy remains uncomfortable. The V-2 program that established his reputation was built with slave labor from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where an estimated 20,000 prisoners died. Yet the Saturn V rocket his team produced remains the most powerful launch vehicle ever successfully flown, and no American reached orbit or walked on the Moon without technology that traced directly to his Huntsville laboratories. The 1959 transfer was the bureaucratic stroke that pointed German rocketry toward the stars instead of the battlefield.