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TWIG - German rocket scientist Konrad Dannenberg, a member of
the team that helped put man on the moon, died in Huntsville,
Alabama on February 16. He was 96.
His wife Jackie said he died of natural causes, the
Birmingham News reported.
Dannenberg played a role in developing the Redstone, Jupiter and
Saturn rockets, especially their engines. He received the NASA
Exceptional Service Medal for successfully starting the
development of the largest rocket ever built, the Saturn V,
which took the first human beings to the moon.
In 1950, 118 German scientists came to Huntsville as part of
Wernher von Braun's team. With Dannenberg's death, only six
survive.
Born in 1912 in Weissenfels, south of the eastern German city of
Leipzig, Dannenberg earned his master's degree in mechanical
engineering from the Hannover Technical University.
Inspired by Austrian amateur rocketeer Max Valier, who advocated
the use of rockets for space flight, and automobile engineer
Fritz von Opel, who built the world's first rocket-powered
automobile engine in 1928, Dannenberg and his colleagues began
building their own rockets, according to NASA's website.
He was drafted by the German Army in the 1930s as a horseman,
but eventually released from military duty because he was deemed
unsuitable to ride horses. He was next sent to Peenemünde, which
would become Germany's premier rocket development and test site.
His main assignment was the development of the 25.4 tons thrust
engine for V-2 rocket production.
In 1960, Dannenberg joined NASA's newly established Marshall
Space Flight Center as deputy manager of the Saturn program. He
retired from that post in 1973 and became an Associate Professor
of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Tennessee Space
Institute (UTSI) in Tullahoma, Tennessee.
With his wife Ingeborg M. Kamke (now deceased), Dannenberg had a
son, Klaus Dieter, who has two married children. From them
Dannenberg had four great grandchildren. He had remarried to
Jacquelyn E. Staiger of Boston, Massachusetts.
Republished with permission from "The Week in Germany"
Related Links:
NASA
Konrad Dannenberg
Wernher von Braun
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