German rocket site launches U.S. space program
Peenemunde was a practice test.
It was a practice test for the real thing – Redstone Arsenal.
Today, more than 60 years after Dr. Wernher von Braun and the German rocket team left the isolated and guarded 50,000-acre military post in northeastern Germany, most of the evidence of Peenemunde – its laboratories, test stands, factories, living quarters, roads and infrastructure — is gone.
But for Ed Buckbee, a picture that superimposed the Peenemunde of the early 1940s over the now overgrown, forested and abandoned German military base showed to him the parallels between the technology center where the Germans launched the first rocket into space and the North Alabama home of the beginnings of the U.S. space program.
“My visit to Peenemunde brought home to me that Wernher von Braun, in his late 20s, erected this immense technology center in the northeastern part of Germany, in the woods,” Buckbee said. “I had no idea of the extent of the technology that was created at that facility.
“Wernher von Braun and his team conceived, designed, fabricated, tested and launched an entirely new missile system from the Peenemunde site and then they repeated that at Redstone Arsenal. The Army system of missile development that we experienced in the ‘50s was created first at Peenemunde by von Braun and his team.”...
Read entire article at Alabama local
It was a practice test for the real thing – Redstone Arsenal.
Today, more than 60 years after Dr. Wernher von Braun and the German rocket team left the isolated and guarded 50,000-acre military post in northeastern Germany, most of the evidence of Peenemunde – its laboratories, test stands, factories, living quarters, roads and infrastructure — is gone.
But for Ed Buckbee, a picture that superimposed the Peenemunde of the early 1940s over the now overgrown, forested and abandoned German military base showed to him the parallels between the technology center where the Germans launched the first rocket into space and the North Alabama home of the beginnings of the U.S. space program.
“My visit to Peenemunde brought home to me that Wernher von Braun, in his late 20s, erected this immense technology center in the northeastern part of Germany, in the woods,” Buckbee said. “I had no idea of the extent of the technology that was created at that facility.
“Wernher von Braun and his team conceived, designed, fabricated, tested and launched an entirely new missile system from the Peenemunde site and then they repeated that at Redstone Arsenal. The Army system of missile development that we experienced in the ‘50s was created first at Peenemunde by von Braun and his team.”...