Konrad Dannenberg

Kyt · Mar 1, 2009

Konrad Dannenberg: German V2 and NASA rocket scientist | Times Online Obituary

Konrad Dannenberg, a pioneering rocket designer and engineer who specialised in rocket propulsion, helped humankind to travel in space. He played a key role in developing the engine that propelled the German V2 rocket, which was the father of all modern ballistic missiles, and he later in America worked on the giant Saturn rocket which launched the Apollo 11 astronauts on their historic voyage to the Moon.

Besides terrorising anew the war-weary population of England in the last year of the Second World War — nothing could be done to provide any sort of defence against it as it plunged to earth from a height of 50 miles at speeds of up to 3,500mph — the V2 provided the basis for the US ballistic missile programme, after the end of the conflict. More than 60 V2s (designated A4s) were launched by the Americans from their testing grounds at White Sands, New Mexico, in the immediate postwar years, with captured German scientists — among them Dannenberg — providing their captors with much of the rocketeering expertise and knowhow.

The first successful test of the V2 had been conducted on October 3, 1942; the weapon could carry a warhead weighing up to 980kg (2,200lb) of high explosive. More than 3,000 of the weapons were launched by the Germans against the Allies, killing some 7,300 civilians and members of the military. About 1,400 were targeted on England, killing an estimated 2,754 civilians and injuring another 6,523.

Konrad Dannenberg was born in 1912 in Weissenfels, Saxony. His family moved to Hanover when he was 2. He became fascinated by space technology at an early age, inspired by an Austrian amateur rocketeer who campaigned for the use of rockets for space flight and by Fritz von Opel, the automobile engineer who constructed the first rocket-powered car engine in 1928. He joined a group of amateurs who built their own rockets.

Dannenberg studied at the Hanover Technical University, receiving his MSc in mechanical engineering. During his university course he was particularly interested in the injection of diesel fuel into engines. This was relevant to the injection of propellants into rocket engines.

In 1939 he was called up into the German Army, put into a horse-drawn company, and stationed in France. In the autumn of 1940 he was discharged from the military as unsuitable for riding horses.

Because of his engineering qualifications, he was recruited to work at the military centre at Peenemünde, a village on the island of Usedom on the German Baltic coast. Peenemünde became notorious as the place where the subsonic V1 pulse-jet-engined flying bombs and V2 rockets were developed and tested, and once its precise whereabouts had been established by Allied intelligence, RAF Bomber Command strained every nerve to inflict as much damage on it as it could.

Dannenberg’s first task was to study the injection system of rocket engines. The early models often exploded on ignition. Dannenberg, working with the missile pioneer Wernher von Braun, eventually designed the multiple mixing nozzles for an effective combustion chamber for rocket engines.

Towards the end of the war it became a matter of US policy to lay hands on as many of the scientists of such an advanced weapons programme as they possibly could, as well as all they could retrieve of the missiles themselves. In both aims they were remarkably successful, largely due to the willingness of the rocket team under its leader von Braun to surrender to US forces rather than trust themselves to the Russians. Dannenberg was one of more than 100 engineers (including von Braun) who were taken to the US to work on the American ballistic missile programme, as part of Operation Paperclip. When the Soviet armies arrived at Peenemünde they found it deserted.

Arriving in America in November 1945 in a ship from Le Havre, Dannenberg and other German missile engineers were soon put to work at Fort Bliss, Texas, designing, constructing and testing ballistic missile systems, whose flight capabilities were then assessed at the White Sands Proving Ground.

Dannenberg and a group of colleagues were moved by the US Army to the Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, where they helped to develop and produce the Redstone and Jupiter missile systems for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Fitted with a booster stage, the Redstone, America’s first large ballistic missile, subsequently launched Explorer I, the first American satellite, and the first American manned missions, carrying the astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into space.

Before this, to co-ordinate the American aerospace effort and to wrest back a lead in the field that had seemed to be slipping to the Russians after their triumph with the launching of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) had been founded in 1958. In 1960 Dannenberg joined Nasa’s newly established US National Marshall Space Flight Centre at Huntsville, Alabama, as deputy manager of the Saturn programme. He had joined what would prove to be the space race’s winning team.

The Saturn rocket had been conceived as a long-range military ballistic rocket and a satellite launcher. But when in 1961 — the year in which the Soviet Union put Yuri Gagarin, the first true astronaut, into orbit — the American President John F. Kennedy vowed that the US would land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, the search for a rocket to accomplish this took on a new urgency. Project Apollo, Man on the Moon — and ahead of the Soviet Union — became a matter of American pride.

Two rockets, Nova and Saturn, were evaluated for the mission. In the end it was Saturn which won out. It was simpler; all its components were air-transportable; its development would require the building of only one new factory.

Dannenberg found himself at the heart of an immense effort of development under von Braun, as a result of which the first manned Saturn V sent the Apollo 8 astronauts into orbit around the Moon in December 1968. After two more missions to test the lunar landing vehicle, in July 1969 a Saturn V launched the crew of Apollo 11 to the first manned landing on the Moon.

For his contribution to the Apollo project’s success, Dannenberg received the Nasa Exceptional Service Medal in 1973. That year he retired from Nasa as deputy director of the programme development mission and payload planning office and the programme manager of the International Space Station, and he became an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Tennessee Space Institute in Tullahoma.

Dannenberg was twice married, first to Ingeborg Kamke who predeceased him. He later married Jacquelyn E. Staiger, of Boston, who survives him with the son of his first marriage.

Konrad Dannenberg, rocket scientist, was born on August 5, 1912. He died on February 16, 2009, aged 96
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Antipodean Andy · Mar 1, 2009

A man who had a huge impact on history. RIP.

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