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.
