VtwinVince wrote: ↑29 Sep 2005 00:42
It's a bit ludicrous to downplay the instrumental role which German rocket engineers played in the US space program.
Wernher von Braun worked on the design of the Redstone-derived Juno I that carried out America's first successful satellite launch in early 1958 as well as the Saturn V moon rocket. Another V-2 engineer, Walter Dornberger, played a major role in the NACA program that led to the North American X-15 hypersonic aircraft, and he also was hired by Bell in the early 1950s, entrusting Bell to design the BoMi manned skip-glide space bomber project, a long-term predecessor to the X-20 Dynasoar military spaceplane program of which he became a key consultant. Therefore, X-15 pilots might have felt very inclined to thank Dornberger for laying the long-term aerodynamic foundations for the Space Shuttle because the libraries of aerodynamic data which were gathered by the X-15 during flight testing were applied by NASA to design and development of the Space Shuttle.
