How Did Operation Paperclip Advance The USace Program

Operation Paperclip: The German Scientists Who Launched the US Space Program

Following the end of the Second World War, Nazis, including German scientists, were desperate to find refuge outside Europe, where they would be protected from the threat of political opinion and the Nuremberg Trials. One place where refuge was found for brilliant German minds was in the US space program, where they drastically progressed the space program and impacted the Cold War efforts. How did Operation Paperclip advance the US space program? Operation Paperclip advanced the US space program by importing and utilizing German scientists' intelligence and efficient management skills.

The main advantage German scientists provided was their intelligence. The German

The Jupiter missiles were another important creation of the German team as part of their work at ABMA (Adams & Balfour 302). These efforts made the technology that would eventually put both the first US satellite and the first man into space. ABMA was incorporated into NASA and became the Marshall Space Flight Center run by Wernher Von Braun (Jacobsen 346), the genius physicist, engineer, administrator, and leader of the German team at ABMA and at NASA (Glass). At the Marshall Space Flight Center, the team's biggest accomplishment, the Saturn V rocket, was created. Again, the German team dominated the program. Among many others, Wernher Von Braun was the chief architect of the Saturn V Launch Vehicle, Arthur Rudolph was the deputy developer on the Saturn Program, Bernhard Tessmann designed the Vertical Assembly Building (Jacobsen 345), and Kurt Debus was the director of Launch Operations Center (Jacobsen 346). This rocket put the first crews into space, and was instrumental for NASA’s success and popularity

Arthur Rudolph, as mentioned earlier, was the Saturn V project manager. One of his most well known and successful ideas was the program control center, a room where all the relevant information on any Saturn subsystems were gathered in a visually accessible manager. The Saturn V management became the paradigm of NASA management that made NASA nationally famous which was only possible under Rudolph’s care and talent (Adams & Balfour 303). Another example of efficient operations at NASA that was developed by thebecause of the German team is the “Dirty hands” method or the “everything-under-one-roof” method. The technique developed at Peenemunde and Kummersdorf, one of the Nazi research centers, involved collecting all scientific and technical expertise for all of the subsystems in one location. While the method could not be maintained fully after the space program expanded, it was never fully abandoned because of its phenomenal speed (Adams & Balfour 302). The speed gained from this method was one of the reasons the space program was expanded and backed. The German team’s efficiency and novel techniques were eventually recognised by James Webb, NASA administrator during the Apollo program. He went on to say, “I saw here…one of the most sophisticated forms of organized human effort that I have ever seen anywhere,” summing up what many people