Wilhelm Angele

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Wilhelm Angele (born February 8, 1905 in Memmingen , † August 22, 1996 in Richmond (Virginia) ) was a German-American engineer for rocket control technology .

Life

family

Wilhelm Angele was a son of the Isny- born master baker Wilhelm Angele senior and his wife Magdalena. Wilhelm Angele senior took over an existing bakery and coach shop in Memmingen in 1903. His other son, Karl Angele, founded a bus company in Memmingen in 1927, which is still in existence today. In 1943, Wilhelm Angele junior married Hildegard Zimmermann († 1995), with whom he had two daughters who both live in the USA. He was close friends with the atomic, electrical engineering and rocket scientist Ernst Stuhlinger , who said of Angele, "There is hardly another person in my life from whom I have learned so much".

job

Wilhelm Angele junior did an apprenticeship as an electrician and worked in this profession for a while after passing his journeyman's examination. From the mid-1920s he studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Nuremberg . He then took up a position at Siemens in Berlin. His original role there was to work on new methods of producing color films. He also worked for Agfa from time to time.

A gyro instrument of the V2 control; exhibited in the Science Museum London

During the Nazi era, Angele developed electrical control systems for the "V2" rockets for his employer on behalf of the Wehrmacht (of which he himself was never a member) in a team of scientists led by Wernher von Braun . However, Angele did not move to the Peenemünde Army Research Center , but stayed in Berlin. Head of department for control and steering in Peenemünde was Helmut Gröttrup . Angele was significantly involved in the development of the first gyroscope controls for aircraft and electro-hydraulic steering gear for the V2 and developed air bearings for gyroscopes and accelerometers. The gyro control is used to compensate for undesirable influences such as drift due to wind or irregularities in the drive on the programmed flight path. With the V2 rocket, the gyro instruments were connected directly to the control for the first time.

At the end of the war, Angele lost his job and initially secured his livelihood as an agricultural laborer near Hanover . At the express request of Wernher von Braun, Angele was brought to the United States in 1946 as part of the American Project Paperclip , a sub-project of the secret Operation Overcast . A total of 117 scientists who had previously worked in the development team for the “ weapons of retaliation ” (and Wernher von Braun as project manager) had been selected for the Paperclip project as unencumbered and harmless “followers” ​​and classified as particularly competent and needed by the US authorities . You should work on behalf of the government to develop the American space missile program. First station was Fort Bliss near El Paso in Texas, in 1950 the team was relocated to the new missile development center Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville (Alabama) , where they were incorporated into the newly founded Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in 1956 and the newly founded US NASA space agency . At ABMA, Angele was Head of Precision Instruments in the Guidance and Control Laboratory.

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The Project Paperclip team at Fort Bliss. (by moving the mouse pointer over the faces, the names are shown)

From the 1960s Angele worked in NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center , which is also located in the "Rocket City" (rocket city) Huntsville (it was built in 1960 on the southern part of the Redstone Arsenal). There he was in the Guidance and Control Division of the Astrionics Laboratory division manager for the development of prototypes and new production methods (Pilot Manufacturing Development Branch) and most recently rose to head of the division for practical applications of space technology (division chief in charge of practical application of space hardware). Angele was involved in many NASA projects, including the development of the Saturn rocket . A specialty of Angeles was the development of ribbon cables and the associated connecting parts, for which he applied for several patents. Flat cables are important in space travel because they take up less space than round cables. In 1968 Wilhelm Angele received the "IPC President's Award" from the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuit (IPC). In the 1960s, Angele also designed lapping devices for the production of absolutely round balls and a method for measuring the smallest roundness deviations (in the tolerance range from a millionth to a tenth of a millionth of an inch ).

His developments contributed in the space race during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union significantly to several successful moon flights of the Apollo program in - including the first moon landing of people in the mission Apollo 11 in July 1969 paid tribute on behalf of NASA Wernher von Braun later personally wrote Angeles's contribution to “the most ambitious project of mankind” in a certificate.

Angele was also involved in the development of the first US satellite . The last project in which Angele played a key role in the Process Engineering Laboratory of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center was the manufacture of ultra-sensitive quartz gyroscopes, for which the precision measuring methodology of spherical roundings developed by Angele was an important basis. Such a quartz gyroscope is used in the gyroscope experiment , which is an essential part of the Gravity Probe B satellite mission for experimental testing of the general theory of relativity .

After his retirement in 1974, Angele worked for many years as a consultant for American aviation companies.

In addition to his professional activity, Angele, like his friend Ernst Stuhlinger, was enthusiastic about astronomy in his private life . Since 1955, he has held various positions in the Von Braun Astronomical Society (VBAS; then Rocket City Astronomical Association , RCAA), of which he was a founding member in 1954. On November 15, 1985, one of the two VBAS observatories, which Angele had helped to build, was named after him. On November 21, 1983, he received an award from the Messier Club in the Astronomical League , the umbrella organization for amateur astronomical associations in the United States, for observing all Messier objects .

Wilhelm Angele died of heart failure at the age of 91 in a hospital where he last lived in Richmond, Virginia.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. He obtained US citizenship in the USA.
  2. ^ Ernst Stuhlinger: Laudation on the 80th birthday of Wilhelm Angele, USA, on February 8, 1985. Archived from the original on October 6, 2008 ; Retrieved July 22, 2009 .
  3. ^ A b c Steve Sloan: Wilhelm Angele Mementos Donated. (PDF (472 KB)) In: Via Stellaris: The Monthly Newsletter of the Von Braun Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, Issue 12. Von Braun Astronomical Society, December 2007, pp. 6-7 , accessed on July 22, 2009 ( English).
  4. a b Bob Ward: Dr. Space: the life of Wernher von Braun , US Naval Institute Press, 2005, p. 56, ISBN 978-0-7509-4303-1 .
  5. Wilhelm Angele's file at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): Records Declassified under the Disclosure Acts , Record Group 65, Class 105, File 010984, Section 001, NARA Box 025, Location 230 86/13/07, FBI Class Name: Foreign Counterintelligence (Formerly Internal Security, Foreign Intelligence), PDF
  6. a b Wilhelm Angele in the Encyclopedia Astronautica , accessed on July 22, 2009 (English).
  7. ^ George C. Marshall Space Flight Center Directory Chart. (PDF; 0.4 MB) George C. Marshall Space Flight Center Alabama, October 1, 1968, archived from the original on July 23, 2009 ; accessed on July 22, 2009 .
  8. ^ Deaths: Wilhelm Angele, Rocket Scientist. In: The Washington Post . August 25, 1996, accessed November 13, 2012 .
  9. IPC 50th Anniversary. IPC, archived from the original on March 28, 2009 ; accessed on July 22, 2009 .
  10. Around a dozen employees of Project Paperclip, including co-founder and namesake Wernher von Braun, were members of the RCAA.
  11. The VBAS keeps, among other things, an Angeles notebook from his student days, created in 1926, which bears the title Basics of Electrical Engineering . Other writings by Angele are held in the archives of the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville.
  12. Messier Club Awardees. Astronomical League, October 27, 2007, archived from the original on December 7, 2008 ; accessed on July 22, 2009 .
  13. ^ Wilhelm Angele, 91, Engineer in Space Program , The Washington Post , Aug. 25, 1996.