1945 - Exploration, Colonization

Exploration, Colonization

Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun and Lieut. Gen. Walter R. Dornberger surrender to U.S. troops in May along with about 100 members of their buzz-bomb group. Dornberger is interned as a prisoner in England (he will emigrate to America in 1947 and work as an adviser on guided missiles to the U.S. Air Force and a consultant to Bell Aircraft); within a few months the other group members are at the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps test site at White Sands, N.M., where they are put to work testing, assembling, and supervising the launching of captured V-2 rockets for high-altitude research purposes (see politics, 1944; exploration, 1958).

Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard dies at Baltimore August 10 at age 52. The Guggenheim Foundation will pay $1 million to the U.S. Government in 1960 for having infringed on many of Goddard's 200 patents, and the government's space research center at Greenbelt, Md., will be named the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1962.