Posted on 05/06/2015 11:59:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The last known surviving member of the German engineering team that designed the rocket that took US astronauts to the Moon has died in Alabama.
Oscar Holderer, who was 95, suffered a stroke last week and did not recover, his son Michael said. Mr Holderer was one of about 120 engineers who moved to the US after World War Two, bringing technology used in the German V2 rocket.
They played a key role in the Saturn V rocket used in the 1969 Moon landing.
The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was part of a project called Operation Paperclip that transferred technology used in Germany's V2 and other rockets to the US.
They were originally based at White Sands, New Mexico, but moved to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, in 1950 where they used early computers and slide rules to design the Saturn V.
'Talented man'
Michael Holderer said his father had designed the high-speed wind tunnel used to develop Saturn and oversaw its construction at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center in Redstone.
"He was one of the more hands-on members of the team. He had his own machine shop here in town as a hobby," he said.
Ed Buckbee, a space historian and former Nasa publicist, said Mr Holderer was the last known survivor of the original group of German engineers.
"He was a very talented man, not only an aeroballistics expert but very accomplished in design and fabrication," he added.
Mr Holderer became a US citizen in 1955. After retiring from Nasa in 1974, he built training devices that are still in use at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Our German scientists were better than their German scientists.
Lets kick the tires and lite the fire..
Well I guess with the passing of the last original nazi- v2- rocketeer, it’s just as well Obama’s “transformed” NASA from its intended mission of boosting rockets into the universe -— into some sort of crazy Moslem ego-boosting hand- holding Allah-be-praised kindergarten.
Von Braun brought only the best with him; by contrast, the Soviets captured some V2 engines (in the Sergei Korolev bio, there’s a nice photo of Korolev standing next to one of them) and the V2 design is the basis for all the world’s various space programs right to the present day (whatever some may say).
“Of course we’re going to the Moon, we just haven’t told der fuhrer.” — attributed to von Braun
The Saturn 5 was designed in the mid-1960s using primarily slide rules and the earliest primitive computers and only flew from 1967 to 1973.
Since then NASA has failed to build a replacement launch vehicle of comparable lift capacity and none are planned.
No private organization could survive while producing increasingly inferior products.
Not that NASA does not produce good science. The Hubble telescope produces great deep space images but even Hubble demonstrates how the NASA organization has become incompetent.
Hubble’s first pictures shocked the scientist at NASA because they were blurred. In the design stage of the primary mirror a calculation error cause the mirror to be ground incorrectly. Hubble had to be retrofitted with a correcting lens. The Hubble program also at the beginning was bid out without an end to end test of the telescope that would have caught the error before the launch of the telescope.
Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the Obama administration is the privatization of parts of the space program.
Well, I think Von Braun saw his rockets ( or rockets using some of his technology at least) go to the moon. It’s all documented in a video. As long as we don’t tell the little foreign fag that we taped the whole thing at Area 51.
True, alas.
The F1 engine on which the Saturn V relied was actually around in the 1950s, built to deliver Ed Teller’s H-bomb, which also gave us the B-52; Teller’s design worked, but was superseded by smaller designs. Von Braun took the F1 with him, all the while intending it for a lunar program.
F1B .
F1B .
Yeah, the idea was floated from time to time, glad they’re getting more serious about it. The engine never had a failure, not to mention, quite a push into the upper atmosphere.
The new SLS (Space Launch System) booster will be slightly larger than Sat V. It's beyond planning and into component testing now.
There's a cool article on the net about the efforts to reverse engineer the F-1 first stage engine to build a new F-1 for the SLS strap-on boosters. The Sat V engines were built by welders and other skilled craftsmen; even the holes in the mixing plate in the combustion chamber were drilled by a guy at a drill press -- they could see his drill placement mistakes.
My father worked at Redstone Arsenal (from the mid 60s to the early 80s) and knew many of the these German scientists including Von Braun. Dad always said they were brilliant and happy as hell to be Americans.
Oops — that’s the article I was thinking of.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Some of the rhetoric around here can get nauseating after a while.
I honor those scientists who came here, adopted themselves as Americans and put us on the moon and beyond.
I used to find him amusing. :’) Not surprisingly, he’s an east coast left wing academic scumbag. Thanks QBFimi.
Thanks ohioman, I don’t doubt it. During his teens, Von Braun had a pen pal (also interested in rocketry and space) here in Grand Rapids.
The SLS relies on extended versions of the SRBs from the STS. That was F U N. Anyway, 3.5 million pounds of thrust is less than half a Saturn V, but engine for engine is bigger than an F1. The liquid fueled engines being built for the SLS won’t get the contraption off the ground — they’d be better off dumping the big useless liquid fueled mains and using all SRBs, with cryo-fueled upper stages for the trip out of Earth orbit.
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