Eberhard Rees

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 2nd of October, 1945, Eberhard Friedrich Michael Rees arrived at Logan Field. He was one of the first German rocket scientists transported to the United States by the Army Ordnance Corps under Operation Paperclip. He was thirty-seven years old. Years of wartime rocketry work lay behind that crossing, and decades of American spaceflight work lay ahead. What made Rees the engineer his colleagues trusted at every level, across two countries and three decades, is where his story begins.

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• 2. From Trossingen to V-2

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  Rees was born on the 28th of April, 1908, in Trossingen, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He studied engineering at the University of Stuttgart, then earned his master's degree from the Dresden University of Technology in 1934. His first position after graduation had nothing to do with rockets. He worked his way up to assistant manager of a steel mill in Leipzig. The change came in the spring of 1939, when Rees arrived at the Army Research Center Peenemünde. He took charge of fabricating and assembling V-2 rockets, overseeing the production line under wartime pressure. Peenemünde was also where Rees began working under Wernher von Braun. That professional collaboration would survive the war's end and follow both men across the Atlantic.

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• 3. Proving Grounds to Arsenal

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  After his arrival in the United States, Rees served first at the Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds. He moved to Fort Bliss by 1946, then to the Redstone Arsenal by 1950. Each posting brought him deeper into the Army's growing ballistic missile program. He also became a naturalized American citizen during these years, completing the formal transition from German wartime engineer to American aerospace professional. The work at those facilities set the stage for a technical breakthrough that his team would complete in August 1957.

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• 4. The Ablative Shield

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  In August 1957, the team Rees led completed development of the ablative heat shield. The device was engineered to protect spacecraft from the extreme thermal conditions of atmospheric re-entry. Rees held the title of Deputy Director of Development Operations for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the time. Three years later, in 1960, he moved to the Marshall Space Flight Center as Deputy for Technical and Scientific Matters. In that position, he directed the Lunar Roving Vehicle program. His 1960 appointment as Deputy positioned him for a larger responsibility that would arrive on the 1st of March, 1970.

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• 5. Directing Marshall

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  On the 1st of March, 1970, Rees was appointed Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He was the center's second director, personally chosen by Wernher von Braun as his successor. His primary task as director was managing the development and construction of Skylab, an American space station. He oversaw that program through its completion, then retired from NASA in 1973. Rees died on the 2nd of April, 1998, in a hospital in DeLand, Florida. He was eighty-nine years old.

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