Ernst Stuhlinger, rocket scientist crucial to U.S. in the space race

Published 5:00 am Thursday, May 29, 2008

Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the most prominent of the Germans who brought their skills in rocket science to the United States after World War II and a close associate of Wernher von Braun, died Sunday at his home in Huntsville, Ala. He was 94.

He died after being hospitalized several times in recent months, according to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a space museum and archive in Huntsville.

As one of the 118 engineers and scientists of the German V-2 missile program who surrendered to Americans toward the end of the war, Stuhlinger played the quiet, behind-the-scenes scientist to the more charismatic von Braun. He was director of science at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville in the early decades of the space age.

The Marshall center, established around the nucleus of the von Braun team, led the development of several generations of rockets, culminating in the most powerful of all, the Saturn 5 that propelled astronauts to the Moon in the Apollo program. Stuhlinger’s expertise was in the guidance and navigation instruments for space flight.

In fact, friends and former colleagues recall that his ingenuity was critical to the first successful American space launching, almost four months after the Soviet Union surprised the world with Sputnik 1. In the frenzy to catch up, an Army team including the German-born engineers and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California was ordered to get the Explorer 1 satellite up, double-time.

The rocket was a combination of V-2 technology and American upper stages. The timing of the second-stage firing had to be exact if the satellite was to achieve orbit. There was no time for elaborate designs and tests. So Stuhlinger retired to his home garage and, in a few hours, emerged with a clever timing device made of ordinary wires, screws and nuts.

On the night of Jan. 31, 1958, tracking the rocket’s ascent from a control console at Cape Canaveral, Fla., Stuhlinger pressed a button at just the right moment to signal the timing device to trigger the second-stage firing, not a second too soon or too late. He became known as “the man with the golden finger.”