Last of German rocket scientists who led US space programme
Georg von Tiesenhausen, who has died aged 104, was the last surviving member of the team of German rocket scientists who worked with Wernher von Braun at the German V-2 factories during World War II and later followed him to the United States to work on its space programme.
Von T, as he was known to colleagues, was not among the original group of German scientists spirited away from under the noses of America’s Soviet allies in 1945, or among the team, led by von Braun, which moved to Alabama in 1950 to lead the US rocket development programme.
But he had been with von Braun at Peenemunde and, after a few years working in Germany after the war, he joined what would become Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Centre, in 1953.
He was with von Braun’s team when it launched Explorer 1, the first US satellite, and when the first US astronaut, Alan Shepard, blasted into space in 1961. He was credited with conceiving and designing the mobile launch facilities for the Saturn V, the three-stage launch vehicle developed to support the Apollo programme.
He also designed the original concept for the battery-powered rover that astronauts drove on the lunar surface during the last three Apollo missions to the moon in 1971 and 1972.
Georg von Tiesenhausen was born into an aristocratic German family in Riga, Latvia, in what was then the Russian Empire. Prominent family members included Ferdinand von Tiesenhausen, the officer in the Russian imperial army whose death at Austerlitz inspired Tolstoy’s character Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, and Hans-Diedrich von Tiesenhausen, a decorated U-boat captain of World War II.
Georg joined von Braun’s team at Peenemunde in 1941, straight from the eastern front. A qualified mechanical engineer, he was recalled from the Wehrmacht once Hitler realised technical expertise could be vital in the war effort.
Von Tiesenhausen was present at the first launch of a V-2 rocket in 1942, and was involved in designing a secret launcher that could be towed by submarine into the Atlantic, enabling Germany to launch V-2 missiles against New York. He reflected later that it was probably as well for his future career that the idea didn’t work.
When asked to comment on criticism of what von Braun’s team had done in the war, von Tiesenhausen said the situation they had been in was ‘‘indescribable’’. ‘‘Nobody else could imagine the pressure we were under and the situation around us . . . You could not, as an individual, extricate yourself. It was impossible.’’
When the war ended, he was offered the opportunity to go to the US with von Braun, but turned it down, not wanting to leave his family in Germany. For the next few years he worked, variously, as a teacher, a truck driver, a mechanic and a designer of winches for cargo ships, before moving to the US.
He spent more than 30 years as an engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Centre, but was bitter about the way in which von Braun’s team had been treated in the early 1970s, when pressure from contractors involved in the space programme led to the removal of most of Nasa’s German scientists, with von Braun transferred to a desk job in Washington and other team members offered a choice between being demoted or resigning.
‘‘The greatest shock of my life was sitting in my director’s office and being told to step down,’’ he told an interviewer in 1986. ‘‘I’ve cried only a very few times . . . It was like killing someone . . . We had done our best and been thrown out.’’
Von Tiesenhausen remained with Nasa when most of his colleagues left ‘‘because I had no choice’’. He accepted a pay cut and worked on proposals for the space station and ideas for using tethers to help launch orbiting satellites with less fuel.
As Nasa’s assistant director of advanced systems, in the early 1980s he designed blueprints for a new breed of self-replicating robots that, he hoped, would eventually run space factories on the Moon.
But when, in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing its seven crew members (the result of the failure of a rubber seal), von Tiesenhausen claimed that the disaster would not have happened had the German team remained in place: ‘‘We were definitely betrayed. So much knowledge was lost.’’
After his retirement in 1986, he worked as a volunteer teaching Space Camp cadets about the space programme. In 2011 the astronaut Neil Armstrong made a rare public appearance to present him with the US Space & Rocket Centre’s inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award for Education.
In 1942 von Tiesenhausen married Asta Esch, with whom he had two daughters and a son. He became an American citizen in 1962. –