III.

Missile and Space Work in United States

The American effort to round up German rocket scientists and bring them to the United States was named Operation Paperclip. Under the project, von Braun and 126 members of his team were installed by the United States Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. They launched their rockets at the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. In 1950 von Braun and his team were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, where they built the United States Army’s Jupiter ballistic missile that launched the first United States satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. Von Braun became a naturalized United States citizen in 1955.

In 1960 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) opened the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville with von Braun as its first director. He supervised the building of the giant Saturn rockets for the Apollo Moon program. On July 16, 1969, a Saturn V rocket launched the crew of Apollo 11, the mission in which man first set foot on the Moon. Six subsequent teams of astronauts were sent to explore the Moon during the Apollo program. After the Apollo program, the Saturn V rocket launched the Skylab space station.

In 1970 von Braun headed NASA’s strategic planning in Washington, D.C. He retired from NASA in 1972, and died in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 16, 1977.