Rocket City Swing – Teams

After WWII, an elite group of German rocket scientists were extracted from Germany… and implanted into Huntsville, AL… The leader of this team was Werner Von Braun. He and his German rocketry team came to Huntsville, AL to aid in the country’s national defense by means of advancing rocketry and manned space flight. The now declassified code name was Operation Paperclip.

The Delta rocket family was a versatile range of American rocket-powered expendable launch systems that provided space launch capability in the United States from 1960 to 2024. NASA intended Delta as “an interim general-purpose vehicle” to be “used for communication, meteorological, and scientific satellites and lunar probes during 1960 and 1961”. NASA made the original Delta contract to the Douglas Aircraft Company in April 1959.

Team Delta with Alaina Rogozhin

Marshall Space Flight Center was formed from the technical and administrative core of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in 1960. This test center was designed to develop the rocket technology in a remote, safe location away from large populations. It was also a key training location where the Airforce test pilots (not yet astronauts) would come to be educated on their missions and the technical aspects of their flight control interface.

Yuri Gagarin abord the Vostok 1, became the first person to successfully achieve manned spaceflight on April 12, 1961… and the space race began. Alan Shepard on the Mercury-Redstone 3, aka Freedom 7, made the US spaceflight on May 5, 1961.

Team Redstone with Ryan Pflumm

From 1962 to 1963 the Atlas boosters launched the first 4 astronauts into ORBIT. But not just into orbit. These astronauts orbited the Earth. This was a HUGE Deal! To give contrast to this amazing feat, the preceding two Redstone launches were suborbital launches.

Team Atlas with Bonnie Cannon

Although the Saturn name was proposed by von Braun in October 1958, it was not until 1963 when President John F. Kennedy identified the Saturn I SA-5 launch as being the point where US lift capability would surpass the Soviets. Until this point, the US had been trailing been behind since Sputnik. To date, the Saturn V is the only launch vehicle to transport human beings beyond low Earth orbit. A total of 24 humans were flown to the Moon in the four years spanning December 1968 through December 1972. No Saturn rocket failed catastrophically in flight.

Team Saturn with Felicia Hoeppner