Bidspirit auction | WW2 Von Braun Rocket Scientist

WW2 Von Braun Rocket Scientist Werner Dahm signed page Op Paperclip. Approx 5 x 3 inch piece hand signed. Werner Karl Dahm (February 16, 1917 in Lindenthal, Germany - January 17, 2008 in Huntsville, Alabama) was an early spaceflight scientist of the Peenemünde Future Projects Office who emigrated to the US under Operation Paperclip and was the Marshall Space Flight Center Chief Aerodynamicist. In the U. S. he was initially involved in tests at White Sands Missile Range using V2 rockets. These results led directly to the Redstone rocket and laid the basis for every other rocket developed in the United States since. The White Sands work included a Mach 3 cruise missile known as the Hermes II, based on a V2 first stage with a radical linear ramjet concept for the second stage. His work on the Hermes II continued after he moved in 1950 with much of the von Braun team to Huntsville, Ala. as part of the Army's ballistic missile program. There he developed the external aerodynamic design for the Army's Redstone missile, which served as the launch rocket for the nation's first live nuclear missile tests and later also launched the first U. S. astronaut into space. He developed a successful Mach 5 ballistic re-entry nose cone using a purely theoretical approach, at a time when no hypersonic wind tunnels existed to test the theories or provide needed data. He subsequently continued pioneering contributions in high-speed aerothermochemistry[5] in the Army's Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and then on the Army's Pershing medium-range ballistic missile and the large Saturn I booster rocket. Following the Russian Sputnik launch, in July 1960 he moved with other von Braun rocket scientists from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency to the newly founded NASA. There, as part of the Apollo Moon landing program, he made major contributions working on the Saturn V booster rocket, on aerothermodynamics, and on liquid hydrogen propellant systems. He subsequently was involved in numerous projects contributing to the nation's manned and unmanned space flight programs, especially Skylab and the Space Shuttle. In the Shuttle development effort he led a team working on vehicle aerodynamics and the main engines, which included developing full-scale component tests and scaling methodologies, and applying computational fluid dynamics to overcome a wide range of aerothermochemistry problems. He was Chief of the Aerophysics Division at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center until 1992, when he became Chief Aerodynamicist at the NASA Center. He was awarded the AIAA Aerodynamics Award in 1997 for his exceptional lifetime contributions to the aerodynamic design and analysis of strategic missiles and manned/unmanned launch rockets, and received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 2003. He continued working in science positions at NASA until his retirement, at 89, in 2006.