>>64000695
It’s hard to imagine Apollo’s 1969 lunar landing happening on schedule without the former Peenemünde engineers brought to the U.S. under Operation Paperclip—here’s why:
1. **Saturn V Development**
* Wernher von Braun’s team of \~120–130 German engineers at Redstone Arsenal formed the nucleus of what became NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and led the design of the Saturn V rocket.
* Saturn V—still the most powerful rocket ever flown—was a quantum leap over anything the pre-Paperclip U.S. rocketry community had built.
2. **Domestic Expertise in 1945**
* The U.S. had organizations like NACA (predecessor to NASA), Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and private firms (e.g. Aerojet, Thiokol) working on liquid- and solid-fuel designs.
* However, before 1945 they were focused on cruise missiles, turbojets, and short-range rockets—nowhere near the megawatt cryogenic engines and massive staging required for lunar missions.
3. **Likely Outcome Without Them**
* **Technically possible**: American engineers could surely have reinvented much of von Braun’s work given enough time and resources.
* **But…**: U.S. rocketry would almost certainly have been delayed by **at least 5–10 years**—missing Kennedy’s “before the decade is out” directive and likely ceding the Moon to the Soviets.
4. **Bottom Line**
* The German scientists didn’t do it all, but they **enabled** the U.S. to leap from V-2–derived test rockets in the late ’40s to flight-proven Saturn V boosters by the mid-’60s.
* Without them, a lunar landing was still within reach eventually—but almost certainly **not by July 1969**, and almost certainly at a much higher cost in time, money, and experimental failures.