Werner Dahm

Werner Dahm (1917 to 2008) was a German-born aerodynamicist who belonged to the Peenemünde rocket team and later became one of the senior aerodynamic engineers of the American space program. Born near Cologne, he was assigned to Peenemünde in late 1941 as the youngest member of the rocket team and worked in the Future Projects Office, using a small supersonic wind tunnel to test designs for proposed long-range rockets, among them the A9 and A10 and the Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile. He found that the aerodynamic center of pressure shifts rearward as a rocket passes into supersonic flight, and helped develop control surface designs that kept the rocket stable. After the war he came to the United States under Operation Paperclip, designed the external aerodynamics of the Redstone missile, and later contributed to the Jupiter, Pershing, Saturn I and Saturn V rockets, Skylab and the Space Shuttle. He became Chief Aerodynamicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and kept working there until he retired in 2006.