Jesco von Puttkamer

Jesco von Puttkamer was a German-born American aerospace engineer who spent most of his career as a senior manager at NASA. Born in Leipzig in 1933 into a noble family, he studied mechanical engineering at the technical university in Aachen and moved to the United States in 1962, where he joined Wernher von Braun's rocket team at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He worked as a senior engineer on the Apollo program and later headed long-range planning for crewed deep space flights beyond Earth orbit. He was regarded as an expert on the Russian space program and argued publicly for human exploration and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He also wrote popular books on spaceflight and science fiction stories, and he died in December 2012.