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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arthur Rudolph | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:12:06.858740+00:00 | kb-cron |
Rudolph was transferred to the British to participate in Operation Backfire from July to October 1945. He was then transferred back to the Americans. The U.S. Army picked up Martha and Marianne Rudolph from Stepfershausen before it was occupied by the Red Army and the Rudolphs were reunited at Camp Overcast near Landshut. In November 1945, Operation Overcast brought Rudolph, von Braun and the rest of the V-2 team temporarily to the US for six months. Overcast was renamed Operation Paperclip in March 1946 and formally approved by President Truman in August 1946 and most of the group stayed permanently. After a brief interrogation at Fort Strong, the team was sent to White Sands Proving Grounds to work on further V-2 engineering in January 1946. In January 1947 Rudolph was moved to the Ordnance Research and Development Division at Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas, where his family finally joined him in April. Since he had been brought into the US without a visa, he and others were sent to Juárez, Mexico, where he obtained a visa and officially immigrated to the U.S. on April 14, 1949. During his time at Fort Bliss, he acted as a liaison to the Solar Aircraft Company, and spent much of 1947 and 1949 in San Diego, California. During a 1949 inquiry by the FBI, Rudolph made the following statement on his participation in the Nazi party:
Until 1930 I sympathized with the Social Democratic party, voted for it and was a member of a Social Democratic union (Bund Techn. Agst. u. Beamt.) After 1930 the economic situation became so serious that it appeared to me to be headed for catastrophe. (I really became unemployed in 1932.) The great amount of unemployment caused the expansion of National Socialist and Communist parties. Frightened that the latter one would become the government I joined the NSDAP (a legally reg. entity) to help, I believed in the preservation of western culture. On June 25, 1950, Rudolph was transferred to Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama, and his group was re-designated as the Ordnance Guided Missile Center. He was naturalized as an American citizen on November 11, 1954, in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1950 Rudolph was appointed as the technical director for the Redstone missile project. Rudolph was assigned as the project manager for the Pershing missile project in 1956. He specifically selected The Martin Company as the prime contractor for the program. He also chose the Eclipse-Pioneer division of Bendix to develop the guidance system after he personally inspected the plant in Teterboro, New Jersey. Rudolph received an honorary doctorate of science degree from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, on February 23, 1959. He received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service, the highest Army award for civilians, for his work on Pershing.
== NASA == Although von Braun and his team had been transferred to NASA in 1960, Rudolph stayed with ABMA to continue critical work on Pershing. In 1961 he finally moved to NASA, once again working for von Braun. He became the assistant director of systems engineering, serving as liaison between vehicle development at Marshall Space Flight Center and the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. He later became the project director of the Saturn V rocket program in August 1963. He developed the requirements for the rocket system and the mission plan for the Apollo program. The first Saturn V launch lifted off from Kennedy Space Center and performed flawlessly on November 9, 1967, Rudolph's birthday. He was then assigned as the special assistant to the director of MSFC in May 1968 and subsequently retired from NASA on January 1, 1969. During his tenure he was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. On July 16, 1969, the Saturn V launched Apollo 11, putting man on the Moon.