Stuhlinger, 94, dies in Huntsvillle

Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the last surviving members of the German rocket team that in Huntsville developed NASA's first moon rockets, died Sunday. He was 94.

"He was one of the giants in the early days of space travel," said Ed Buckbee, who was a NASA public affairs officer and spokesman for the rocket team during the 1960s.

Stuhlinger was born in 1913 in the small German village of Niederrimbach. He graduated in 1936 from Tubingen University, where he studied under Hans Geiger, developer of the Geiger Counter.

Stuhlinger went on to work at the Technical University of Berlin and later for Germany's atomic energy program. But in 1941 he was drafted into the German Army and the cosmic ray physicist wound up as a private first class fighting on the Russian front.

In 1943 Stuhlinger was ordered away from the Russian front to begin work with a group of German rocket engineers led by Wernher von Braun. That group was developing a large rocket, later called the V-2, that wreaked havoc on England during the latter part of World War II. Those were the first ballistic missiles.

At the end of the war, Stuhlinger and other members of von Braun's team were brought to America to help the U.S. build missiles. The group ended up in Huntsville in 1950 to work on missiles at Redstone Arsenal. The Redstone missile the team built put up the first U.S. satellite. The team later transferred to NASA and were responsible for developing the Saturn V rockets that launched men to the Moon during the Apollo missions.

Stuhlinger was director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center during the 1960s and was considered by many the third ranking member of the German rocket team, Buckbee said. That lab was what von Braun looked to for bringing forward new projects, such as the Moon and Skylab, Buckbee said.

"He (Stuhlinger) was the guy who looked to the future," Buckbee said. "Ernst always wanted to go to Mars."

A month after man first walked on the Moon, a proposal Stuhlinger helped von Braun prepare was presented to Congress, Buckbee said. That plan didn't get anywhere. After leaving NASA in the 1970s, Stuhlinger went to work for the University of Alabama in Huntsville as a senior research scientist. There, he did research on electric cars.

During his retirement, Stuhlinger co-wrote books about the history of the rocket team and often was called on to speak on behalf of the German rocket team. In interviews he often advocated going back to the Moon and especially a trip to Mars.

While Stuhlinger didn't get to see a Mars mission take off, on Sunday, NASA did announce that its Phoenix spacecraft had landed on Mars, considered one of the precursor missions for preparing for a manned trip to Mars in the next two decades.

Stuhlinger also was the one who often defended the rocket team when criticism arose about the team's work to develop the rockets for Nazi Germany and the slave laborers who died manufacturing the rockets.

"We were not murderers and we are not criminals and we have tried to set the record straight," Stuhlinger said in a 1994 interview with The Birmingham News. "But there are a very few negative people, who, unfortunately, have a lot of influence and have never had to live in a dictatorship like we did."

E-mail: kfaulk@bhamnews.com