![]() TEASEL MUIR-HARMONY: And so Huntsville, Alabama is hugely influenced culturally by all these ex-Nazi engineers who worked on the V2 rocket program in Germany during World War II. Ultimately, more than 1,600 German scientists came to the U.S. Wernher von Braun, whose expertise was rockets, was one of the first to arrive, in September, 1945. wanted to capitalize on Nazi weapons technology and keep these scientists out of the hands of the Soviet Union. As World War II ended and the Cold War began, the United States started bringing in German scientists to work for the government as part of a top-secret intelligence program called “Operation Paperclip.” The U.S. KATIE HAFNER: You heard that right: Nazi engineers. And he came to Huntsville with a bunch of German Nazi engineers. TEASEL MUIR-HARMONY: The big figure head there is Wernher Von Braun a former Nazi SS officer. Teasel Muir-Harmony is curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. TEASEL MUIR-HARMONY: Huntsville, Alabama, it's worth noting, is this interesting case. army had a post just outside Huntsville, where civilians and army personnel worked on missiles, munitions and rocket design.ĪRCHIVAL TAPE: Quiet no longer, Huntsville now is rocket city USA.ĬAROL SUTTON LEWIS: Huntsville became rocket city in a pretty surprising way… But today, the sound of industry and progress in this community is the bellow of a rocket motor.ĬAROL SUTTON LEWIS: The U.S. Just a few years ago, Huntsville was a quiet town. ![]() KATIE HAFNER: So before we can get into YY's work with rocketry and materials science, we want to take you back to the early days of NASA…ĪRCHIVAL TAPE: Huntsville, Alabama, founded in 18 hundred and five. We’ll look at two designs that YY worked on while she was at NASA: the F-1 engine of the Saturn V rocket – that’s the rocket that got us to the moon – and the Moon Rock Box, which was used to collect lunar samples.ĬAROL SUTTON LEWIS: We started looking into YY’s work at NASA to learn about what exactly she did there.īut investigating her time at NASA also opened our eyes to the important and complicated history of the space program… KATIE HAFNER: …known as YY – actually did as a mechanical engineer. In this episode, we are diving into the work – what Yvonne Young Clark… KATIE HAFNER: And this is Lost Women of Science. KATIE HAFNER: One of those contractors was Yvonne Young Clark.ĬAROL SUTTON LEWIS: And I’m Carol Sutton Lewis… YVONNE CLARK: My assignment was to, um, help design the box that brings the samples – the rocks – back from the moon. KATIE HAFNER: Project Apollo was a completely unprecedented undertaking, and to make it happen, NASA hired outside contractors. ![]() set its sights on sending humans to the moon… KATIE HAFNER: As the Cold War heated up, the United States and the Soviet Union were in a race to achieve breakthroughs in space exploration.ĪRCHIVAL TAPE: The United States space program advanced as the Saturn V rocket was rolled out to… NASA, Rocket Engines, and the Moon Rock BoxĪRCHIVAL TAPE: 1957, year of space and Sputnik dogs… Laika, first space traveler, was ready for the takeoff… This podcast is distributed by PRX and published in partnership with Scientific American. brought her troubleshooter’s mind to a problem that was plaguing some of the country’s top scientists. And we take a deep dive into the history of the American space program, the mechanics of a rocket and how Y.Y. did at NASA on the Saturn V rocket and the design of the “moon rock box” for transporting lunar samples back to Earth. Clark, or Y.Y., actually do as a mechanical engineer? This episode is about the work itself-specifically, the work Y.Y.
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