Dannenberg 810002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Dannenberg, born August 5, 1912 was a German-American rocket pioneer and member of the German Rocket Team.

Dannenberg was born in Weißenfels, Prussian Saxony. At the age of two, he and his family moved to Hanover, where he spent his youth. He became interested in space technology while attending a lecture by Max Valier. He witnessed two tests with a rocket driven railroad car in Burgwedel near Hanover and then joined Albert Püllenberg's group of amateur rocketeers. Dannenberg studied mechanical engineering at the University of Hanover with emphasis in diesel fuel injection, which is similar to the injection of propellants into a high pressure rocket engine. In World War II, he was drafted into the German army in 1939 and took part in the Battle of France.

In Spring 1940, through the influence of Püllenberg, Dannenberg was discharged from the army and became a civilian employee at the German Army's Research and Development Center in Peenemünde. Under Walter Thiel's guidance he became a rocket propulsion specialist. His main assignment was the development of the 25.4 tons thrust engine for V-2 production. Many improvements on which he worked could not be completed in time for production. After Thiel's death in the bombing raid of August 1943, a design freeze stopped all development efforts. He then became Walter Riedel's deputy and headed the crash effort to finalize production drawings of the V-2.

After the end of World War II, Dannenberg was brought to the United States with 117 other German specialists under Operation Paperclip to Fort Bliss, Texas. Most members of the group performed calculations and designs of future advanced launch vehicles with longer ranges and greater payloads. About 30 members trained the U.S. Army and the support contractor General Electric to launch V-2's at the White Sands Proving Ground. Due to range limitations, all test launches had to be launched vertically to limit range. Robert H. Goddard's idea of upper atmosphere research could now be conducted on a large scale. When the Korean War started, the group was required to leave their quarters in an Annex to the Wm. Beaumont Hospital, and was eventually transferred to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. There the development of the Redstone Missile was their first assignment. At that time Wernher von Braun decided not to start their own rocket engine development, but to purchase an engine from North American Aviation (NAA) that was being developed by Dannenberg's former boss, Riedel, who had previously left the team to join NAA. Due to these circumstances, Dannenberg became Liaison Engineer at NAA's Rocketdyne Division and procured rocket engines for the Redstone Missile and the Jupiter IRBM for the U.S. Army. He also became responsible for the production of the Redstone and Jupiter missile systems for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the Chrysler plant in Detroit, Michigan.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US


An aerial view of Peenemünde, Germany where Konrad Dannenberg designed and tested the first successful V2 rocket launches.
An aerial view of Peenemünde, Germany where Konrad Dannenberg designed and tested the first successful V2 rocket launches.

In 1960, Dannenberg joined NASA's newly established Marshall Space Flight Center as Deputy Manager of the Saturn program. He received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for successfully starting the development of the largest rocket ever built, the Saturn V, which took the first human beings to the moon.

When Arthur Rudolph came back from the army's development of the Pershing missile system, Braun assigned the management of the Saturn system to him. Dannenberg then started to work on Saturn-based space stations, which were eventually was replaced by the Space Shuttle-based ISS.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire



Dannenberg retired from the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1973 and became an Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Tennessee Space Institute (UTSI) in Tullahoma, Tennessee.

Dannenberg is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and past president of the Alabama/Mississippi Chapter of this organization. In 1990 he received the prestigious DURAND Lectureship and in 1995 the Hermann Oberth Award. He is a member of the NASA/MSFC Retirees Association, an honorary member of the Hermann Oberth Society of Germany and a charter member of the L-5 Society, which is now the National Space Society (NSS). In 1992, the Alabama Space and Rocket Center established "The Konrad Dannenberg Scholarship" in his honor which grants the winning youngster free admittance to a Space Academy session. He has attended many meetings of the International Astronautical Federation and presented a number of historical papers in their sessions. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info


With his deceased wife Ingeborg M. Kamke, Dannenberg has a son, Klaus Dieter, who has two married children. From them Dannenberg has four great grandchildren. He is now married to Jacquelyn E. Staiger of Boston, Massachusetts.