When the Germans, and Rockets, Came to Town

New York Times : In 1950 Alabama, a small cotton producing town called Huntsville lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its fortune. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man âmdash; a crackpot, evidently âmdash; who claimed humans could visit the moon.Ultimately those German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit in January 1958 and putting astronauts on the moon in 1969.Far less attention, though, has been given to the space program’s permanent transformation of Huntsville, now a city of 170,000 with one of the country’s highest concentrations of scientists and engineers.