Ernst Stuhlinger

Ernst Stuhlinger (1913 to 2008) was a German-American physicist and rocket scientist who worked on guidance systems and electric propulsion. Born in Niederrimbach in Württemberg, he took a doctorate in physics at Tübingen in 1936, was drafted into the German Army and in 1943 joined Wernher von Braun's team at Peenemünde. He came to the United States after the war with Operation Paperclip, worked on Army missile programs and became director of the Space Science Laboratory at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He started the Explorer 1 staging timer in 1958, studied solar powered spacecraft with ion thrusters, wrote Ion Propulsion for Space Flight and is regarded as a pioneer of electric propulsion.