Dr. Georg von Tiesenhausen, last of German rocket team, dies in Alabama

[eppur_se_muova]

By Lee Roop

[e-mail]

Dr. Georg von Tiesenhausen, the last of the German rocket scientists who was part of Dr. Wernher von Braun's moon rocket team, died at his Huntsville residence Sunday night, people close to the rocket team confirm. He was 104.

Von Tiesenhausen - Von T as he was known to the Germans - was a legend in rocketry. When the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville gave von Tiesenhausen a lifetime achievement award in 2011, Neil Armstrong made a rare public appearance to present it. Von Tiesenhausen taught Space Campers for years after retiring from NASA.
***
Von Tiesenhausen was not among the original Germans who came to Huntsville with von Braun in 1950 in the first wave of what was called Operation Paperclip.

But he had been with von Braun during World War II and was with von Braun's team when it launched the first U.S. satellite and the first U.S. astronauts.

After a few years working in Germany after the war, von Tiesenhausen joined von Braun in Huntsville where he conceived and designed the mobile launch facilities for the Saturn V. He also came up with the idea and designed the original concept for the lunar rover at Marshall.
***
https://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2018/06/dr_georg_von_tiesenhausen_last.html

[struggle4progress]

1. Before he was brought to the US, he was designing missiles for the Nazis

Daniel Oberhaus
Jun 6 2018, 2:41pm

... “To enter the area of Peenemünde was one of the greatest surprises of my life,” von Tiesenhausen said in a television interview from the 80s. “Since the age of 14 I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: To be involved in rocketry and spaceflight.”

The research center was best known as the stomping grounds of the pioneering rocket scientist Werner von Braun—who was Peenemünde’s director— and von Tiesenhausen spent his days at the research center as a section officer working on the Nazi’s V-2 rocket. This rocket is infamous for being the world’s first long range, guided ballistic missile.

Unlike von Braun, who joined the Nazi party before World War II and served as a member of the SS, von Tiesenhausen’s joined von Braun’s Peenemünde team in 1943 fresh out of Hamburg University where he had studied engineering after a brief stint in the army. He had been recruited as part of a wider effort in Germany that year to beef up the Nazi regime’s science and engineering corps, which included recalling thousands of scientists from the front lines ...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3a4w8/nasa-nazi-georg-von-tiesenhausen-operation-paperclip