The Nazi engineers who built the Saturn rockets for Apollo

Countries & Cities · Published 15 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: The rockets that carried humans to the moon were born from a controversial legacy. Following World War II, the U.S. Army recruited a team of German missile specialists to build the foundation of American rocketry, transforming weapons of war into the vehicles of exploration.

In August 1945, the U.S. Army initiated Operation Paperclip, a program to recruit scientists and engineers from Nazi Germany who had developed advanced military technologies. Among them were 127 missile specialists, including Wernher von Braun, who had worked on the V-2 rocket. Approximately 125 engineers formed this primary unit, based first at Fort Bliss, Texas, to oversee V-2 rocket test firings at White Sands Proving Ground.

By 1950, the team moved to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. The Redstone and Jupiter missiles were created by the German group, joined by US civilian and military staff, while operating within the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. While originally conceived as weapons, these rockets later became famous for civilian missions: Jupiter launched Explorer I, the first U.S. Mercury capsules piloted by Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard in 1961 were propelled by Redstone rockets, while Explorer I, the first US satellite, launched in 1958.

When NASA was established in 1958, officials decided that the Saturn rockets being developed by von Braun's team would be more useful for space exploration than military use. Consequently, the team was transferred from the Army to NASA. The George C. Marshall Space Flight Center was officially opened by President Dwight Eisenhower. This dedication occurred on 8 September 1960. The center then became the primary hub for the Saturn rockets that powered the Apollo program, eventually landing astronauts on the moon.

Beyond propulsion, the center's legacy includes building the Hubble Space Telescope, the Skylab space station, and the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Today, the center employs nearly 6,000 people and continues to manage the Space Launch System (SLS) for the Artemis project, while also hosting private spaceflight companies like Blue Origin.

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