Ernst’s Ions Week on Beyond Apollo: The Cosmic Butterfly (1954)

This week on Beyond Apollo, space historian David S. F. Portree presents a four-part series on the life, work, and ion-drive spaceships of space pioneer Ernst Stuhlinger. In part one, he describes Stuhlinger's enormous 1954 "Sun Ship."

Image: Frank Tinsley/American Bosch Arma Corporation
Ernst Stuhlinger earned his Ph.D. in Physics in 1936 at the age of 23 and went to work for the German nuclear program in 1939. Despite his scientific credentials, he was drafted in 1941 and sent to the Russian front. In 1943, after surviving the Battle of Stalingrad, he was assigned to work on guidance systems in Hitler’s V-2 missile program.
Stuhlinger owed his place in the Guided Missile Development Division at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, to Operation: Paperclip, the U.S. Army’s effort to retrieve rocket engineers and V-2s from the smoking ruins of the Nazi empire. Stuhlinger and the 125 other Paperclip Germans made the U.S. Army’s job easy; they defected as a group to the American side in the chaotic closing days of the Second World War in Europe.
The U.S. military was, of course, mainly interested in tapping their talents to build missiles, but several of the Germans did their energetic best to ...