At 02:17 PM 2/20/2007, Margaret Leber wrote:

From: Patrick McGrane [mailto:[email protected]]

...

The US brought Werner Von Braun here to the US to design rockets which included the Atlas 5.

Check your history. Von Braun worked on Redstone and Jupiter/Jupiter-C, since he was working for the Army. The original Atlas was the work of Karel Jan Bossart (who came to the US from Belgium in 1930), and was a USAF project. Von Braun left the Army to work for NASA at Marshall in 1960, where he led the Saturn program.

Atlas 5 was a *much* more recent program, it even came after Atlas II. The first Atlas 5 flight was in 2002.

Folks who read all of the thread in question know who *actually* busted Godwin's Law first. :-)

-- 73 de Maggie K3XS Editor, Phil-Mont Mobile Radio Club Blurb - http://www.phil-mont.org Elecraft K2 #1641 -- AOPA 925383 -- ARRL 39280

He probably meant the Saturn-5 which was used on the Apollo missions.

If any of you were old enough to have watched TV back then, you would have seen the repeated series of failed (US Navy) Vanguard attempts to launch an orbiting package. Only, after The Jupiter-C team was allowed to launch (they had petitioned to do this for months), then the US succeeded in orbiting a satellite.

Von Braun's groups main contribution was helping the US in the missile race with the USSR. The USSR imported their own German rocket experts for their program.

The only folks with launch capability were the military. NASA provided the satellite and mission organization. Many of my former colleagues at JPL worked on the tracking system. My room mate (we shared an apartment on the calif. beach) worked in Orlando on the Saturn.

73, Ed - KL7UW ====================================== BP40IQ 50-MHz - 10-GHz www.kl7uw.com 144-EME: FT-847, mgf-1801, 4x-xpol-20, 185w DUBUS Magazine USA Rep [email protected] ======================================