User:Casphodel23/Operation Paperclip

Adolf Busemann
Dr. Adolf Busemann was born in Lubeck, Germany, in 1902. He graduated from the Carolo Wilhelmina Technical University in Braunschweig and received a Ph.D. in engineering in 1924. In 1925, the Max-Planck Institute invited him to become an official aeronautical research scientist, and in 1930, he became a professor at Georgia Augusta University in Goettingen.

Busemann spent many years working for the German government, most notably directing research at the Braunschweig Laboratory. He gave a speech in 1935 at the Volta Congress, an international meeting on the problems of high-speed aeronautics. At this conference, he presented his first theory of how the angle of sweep of a plane wing reduces drag at supersonic speed. After the war, He traveled to the United States to assist them with the war tensions with Russia, where he continued his work on his theory of wing sweep.

Wernher von Braun
Wernher von Braun is known for developing rocket and space-flight technology, including the V-2 missile and the Saturn V rocket, which took astronauts to the moon. In late 1932, he worked for the German army to develop new liquid propulsion-based missiles. He received a doctorate in physics in 1934 from the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin. He became a member of the Nazi party in 1937 and was made a junior SS officer in 1940. He and his team then surrendered to the Allies at the end of World War II, shortly after Hitler’s suicide in 1945. They were brought to America through Operation Paperclip and assimilated into NASA's space program, where they worked on missile technology at Fort Bliss before transferring to Huntsville, Alabama. He became the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960.

Von Braun is also a controversial figure for his involvement with the Nazi party and the slave labor involved in developing the V-2 rocket in Germany before it began to be developed in the United States. He became a member of the Nazi party in 1937 and was made a junior SS officer in 1940.

Marshall Space Flight Center
In July 1960, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) established the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama after taking control of the Development Operations Division from the Army’s Redstone Arsenal. The Redstone Arsenal was led by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Wernher von Braun became the first director of the MSFC. The MSFC's development team was formed by American engineers from the Redstone Arsenal and 118 German migrants who came from Peenemünde through Operation Paperclip. Von Braun worked with Operation Paperclip to get scientists from his team to the United States. They began work at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas in September 1945, and most of the team had arrived by 1946. Von Braun and his team worked as consultants for the military until 1950 when they began transferring to Huntsville.

Originally, the center focused on weaponry and further development of the V-2 rocket line but later became one of NASA’s main development centers for space flight projects. Von Braun and his team used the technology from the V-2 to create the Saturn rocket line, enabling the United States to travel to the moon. The team also worked on missions that related to moon landing missions, such as the lunar rover. However, the main projects from the Marshall Space Flight Center were the V-2 rocket and the Apollo missions.

V-2 Rocket
The V-2 rocket was developed in Germany at the Peenemünde military research center. Werhner von Braun was the director of Peenemünde and worked with a team of engineers, physicists, and chemists. The Nazis used the V-2 rocket during World War II to attack Paris and Great Britain. Roughly five thousand people died in these attacks. The location of V-2 production moved to Mittelwerk in Nordhausen after a British raid on Peenemünde on August 17, 1943. Mittelwerk was supplemented with slave labor from Dora, a nearby concentration camp.

Production of the V-2 missile then moved to the United States after Wernher von Braun surrendered to the Allies (Hall 2022). In March 1946, a V-2 was test-fired in New Mexico, followed by the first launch of a captured V-2 in April of the same year. After months of adaptation, a V-2 missile was fired in White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico that broke a record with an altitude of 116 miles (186.68 km). The V-2 rockets were used to test the effects of cosmic rays on fruit flies and seeds. They also took the first pictures of Earth from 100 miles (160.93 km) in the air and tested g-force on various monkeys.

Apollo Missions
The Marshall Space Flight Center was one of three institutions at NASA involved in the Apollo program. The Center was equipped to become a part of Apollo because it had the facilities to study rocketry: Aero-Astrodynamics, Astrionics, Space Sciences, Propulsion and Vehicle Engineering, Computation, Manufacturing, Test, and Quality. Each of these laboratories handled a different aspect of creating and testing rockets that suited the shift from military weapons to space travel. The weaponry from WWII set the precedent for the kinds of technology used to create the Saturn rocket line. The Marshall engineers’ experience in rocket development led to what Dieter Grau, head of the Quality lab, described as a “rigid inspection program” focused on craftsmanship. This meant to create prototypes that had a higher success rate instead of lesser prototypes that required more tests.

The Marshall engineers created the launch vehicles and designed some launching facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida during the Apollo program. They also created the Saturn rocket line, which was the kind of rocket that sent American astronauts to the moon. The Saturn rocket line drew on previous military engineering, such as the liquid propulsion system developed from von Braun’s V-2 rocket and navigation systems derived from the UA army’s Redstone and Jupiter rockets.