Arthur Rudolph

Arthur Rudolph was a German-American rocket engineer who served as project director for the Saturn V, the launch vehicle that carried the Apollo missions to the Moon, managing its development at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center under Wernher von Braun. He began his rocketry career in Germany working on early liquid-fuel rocket experiments before joining the V-2 program at Peenemunde during the Second World War, where he served as operations director at the underground Mittelwerk factory where V-2s were assembled using forced labor from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, later the subject of a US Justice Department investigation. Brought to the United States after the war through Operation Paperclip, he worked on the Redstone and Pershing missile programs before leading Saturn V development, for which he received NASA's Distinguished Service Medal in 1969. In 1984, facing renewed scrutiny of his wartime record, he agreed to leave the United States and renounce his citizenship rather than face formal proceedings, settling in West Germany for the remainder of his life.