Andrew J. Dunar set to speak at ArchiTreats today | Arts & Culture

Join the Alabama Department of Archives and History today, October 18th, at noon as ArchiTreats: Food for Thought continues another year of informative talks on Alabama history at the Alabama Department of History and Archives.

Andrew J. Dunar will present The Space Race in Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alabama played a vital role in the American space program during the 1950s and 1960s.  Engineers in Huntsville developed and tested the propulsion system that carried the first people to the Moon in 1969 and the early 1970s.  A group of German expatriate engineers led by Wernher von Braun came to Huntsville in 1950, where they worked at Redstone Arsenal in the army’s rocket program.  They worked with American engineers, most of whom earned their degrees at universities in the South, for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in the 1950s.  After the formation of NASA this team provided the core of the Marshall Space Flight Center established in Huntsville in 1960, which with Houston’s Manned Spacecraft Center (later Johnson Space Center) was one of the two largest NASA centers throughout the Apollo Program.  

The talk will examine the development of the space industry in Huntsville, including the melding of German and American approaches to engineering, differences between military and civilian approaches to rocket engineering, and Huntsville’s involvement in the race to the Moon.   

The public is invited to bring a sack lunch and enjoy a bit of Alabama History.

For more information, call 334-353-4726 or visit the Department of Archives and History's website.

Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History