Ernst Steinhoff

Ernst Steinhoff was a German-American rocket scientist who specialised in guidance, control and range instrumentation. Born in 1908 in Treysa, he studied aeronautics and meteorology at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology, earned a doctorate on aviation instruments in 1940 and worked in the von Braun rocket group at the Peenemuende Army Research Center. He came to the United States in 1945 under Operation Paperclip, worked at Fort Bliss and then at Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands, and received an exceptional civilian service award in 1958. He is credited as an early advocate of using space resources for Mars exploration and became the first chairman of the Working Group on Extraterrestrial Resources. He was inducted into the New Mexico International Space Hall of Fame in 1979 and died in 1987.