Dannenberg studied mechanical
engineering at the Technische Hochschule Hannover (current University of
Hannover) with emphasis in diesel fuel
injection, because he recognized that injectors would also be part of the
process of moving propellants into a high-pressure rocket engine.
When World War II began,
Dannenberg, a member of the Nazi party since 1932, was
drafted into the German Army in 1939, serving first with a horse-artillery unit
acquired by the German Army in Czechoslovakia. He took
part in the initial stages of the Battle of France.
In the spring of 1940,
through the influence of Püllenberg, Dannenberg was discharged from the army
and became a civilian employee at the Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde (Peenemünde
Army Research Center) Under Walter Thiel's
guidance, he became a rocket propulsion specialist. His main assignment was
developing a rocket engine for the V-2 ballistic missile. He was at Peenemünde on 3 October 1942
to witness the launch of the first man-made object to reach outer space, a V-2
rocket. This was the first man made vehicle to ever reach space which most
experts agree is over 50 miles in altitude. Many improvements on which he
worked could not be completed in time for production. After Thiel's death in an
August 1943 bombing raid, a design freeze stopped all development efforts.
Dannenberg then became Walter Riedel's
deputy and headed the crash effort to finalize production drawings of the V-2,
the world's first ballistic missile,
used by the Nazis to bomb London. He was interviewed for the documentary
"The Hunt for Hitler's Scientists
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.[6] 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-2s at the White Sands
Proving Ground. Due to range
limitations, all rockets were launched vertically, to limit their 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 were eventually transferred to the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, where development of the PGM-11 Redstone Missile was their first assignment. At that
time, rocket pioneer and former
SS major
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 and the Jupiter IRBM for the
U.S. Army. He also became responsible for production of the Redstone and
Jupiter missile systems for the Army
Ballistic Missile Agency at the Chrysler plant in Detroit, Michigan.
An
aerial view of Test
Stand VII at
Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde (Peenemünde Army Research
Center), where Konrad Dannenberg assisted in designing and testing the
first successful V2 rockets.
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 in 1973 for successfully initiating
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, von Braun assigned the management of the Saturn
system to him. Dannenberg then started to work on Saturn-based space stations,
which were eventually replaced by the Space Shuttle-based ISS.
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 was 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 1996, the Hermann Oberth Award. He was a member of the NASA/MSFC Retirees
Association, an honorary member of the Hermann Oberth Society of Germany and a
charter member of the L5 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 attended many
meetings of the International
Astronautical Federation and
presented a number of historical papers in their sessions.
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