Viewing page 3 of 5

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:36:12]
{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
-- something with Roth, Rothstein, Rothenberg, or something like that. And he did these reports for either Langley, or --

[00:36:23]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Ames?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
-- or Ames. No, I don't think it was Ames.

[00:36:27]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}Louis?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Lewis! Lewis -- I think it was working with or for Lewis.

[00:36:34]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
This would have been on combustion and --

[00:36:37]
{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
That was still jet engines, ja? Jet engine injection.

[00:36:42]
And he studied also, what do you have to do in order to really have good, efficient combustion.

[00:36:46]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
You sure it wasn't piston engine combustion?

[00:36:50]
{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}Could have been piston engine combustion. He really did only injection studies, ja? And then he put a piece of paper under it and he measured where do you get most of your fuel?

[00:37:01]
And then he tried to improve it to have an even distribution over the whole piece of paper.

[00:37:06]
So he made some very basic studies. And I read quite a number of his reports and of course I drew my conclusions from these reports. And tried to implement some of his ideas.

[00:37:18]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
So that there really was an influence from earlier - [[cross]] - aircraft engine injection?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
We had some pretty fair information.

[00:37:27]
I think I mentioned I knew Goddard's book? I had that. And we apparently also, maybe again through universities, we also could get these reports.

[00:37:37]
Well as I said, I was still in Hanover when I got a hold of these reports, and of course universities have normally pretty good libraries that contain all these reports.

[00:37:48]
And I finally even met that guy in one of the earlier meetings here.

{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Really?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Ja, and he was also pleased, in a way, that his work was not only being used here, but even over there.

[00:38:02]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
OK -- Thiel, I haven't asked you yet to describe him, or --

[00:38:07]
What was he like as a person? - [[cross]] - What was his talent?

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
He was also a very dynamic man, he was a little bit like von Braun.

[00:38:15]
He was not quite as much interested in general publicity, he was more strictly engineering-oriented. And I think he was an excellent engineer - I think really most of the credit for the V-2 engine should go to him.

[00:38:28]
And the engine was more or less in existence when I came up there - it didn't work, we had to make it to work - but the basic design was there. The combustion chamber was there.

[00:38:38]
I think he was the one who came up with the idea of a turbo pump, and he worked with Wewerka and that was basically in the turbo pump area. He was the one who built the steam plant in order to drive the turbine.

[00:38:55]
And we worked with Walter in that area; we got our hydrogen peroxide from Walter. And so Thiel should really get an awful lot of credit for that and of course since he died during the bomb raid on Peenemünde, he's normally not being mentioned too much.

[00:39:12]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
This actually - I guess Reisig agrees with you because this article also emphasizes Thiel's role - maybe I should leave the diagram out --

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Yeah, and I think that was really the biggest loss for Peenemünde,

[00:39:25]
when he died, when he was not there anymore. And he was working already on a Mischdüse, an improved version of the rocket chamber, which is pretty close to the Redstone engine.

[00:39:37]
We were working already on these designs. And I think the Redstone engine was finally built this way by North American Rockwell, because Riedel again from the University of Berlin who worked with us in Peenemünde --

[00:39:50]
-- he went finally, he was finally hired by North American Rockwell, and so he knew about all these ideas and he then implemented them.

[00:39:58]
We tried to do it in Peenemünde, but we had considerable combustion instability problems,

[00:40:06]
so the combustion you probably heard about, combustion instability.

{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Right.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
And we never got over that so we finally decided to use this engine.

[00:40:14]
If Thiel would have been there, I personally would guess that he might have succeeded in switching to the much simpler Mischdüse injection system.

[00:40:27]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Yeah, there are a lot of details that I want to get out of that, all of what you just said.

[00:40:34]
So you came in and you worked on the Starthilfe motor and probably by 1941 sometime you had solved the problems with getting that to work without having burn-throughs, right? And combustion instabilities?

[00:40:52]
And you were also at the beginning working on this 1.4 tonne thrust --

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Right. And actually these works went on parallel.

[00:41:02]
We had two different test stands - the one-tonner was tested on one test stand, the 1.4 unit on another test stand, and so we could do the work parallel.

[00:41:12]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Was the 1.4 tonne the same motor that you used in A-3 and A-5 ?

[00:41:18]
{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
It's actually this unit here, this head unit, and it was strictly a test motor, so it was only used for testing, it had no project application.

[00:41:29]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
OK, so the A-5 motor was, was the something that stemmed from an earlier --

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
That was an earlier design, ja.

{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
Right, that was, ok, that's right, that was this design --

[00:41:40]
-- here - [[cross]] - it had a very long combustion chamber.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
Right, right, ja, and that was quite different, a very long combustion chamber, again probably people didn't atomize their propellants well enough,

[00:41:51]
so you needed some time for them to react, ja? If you have a good reaction, you can do it with a very short chamber.

[00:41:58]
{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
So, yeah, according to this description from Gerhard Reisig - in that motor you had the problem of - the very great length meant that you ended up getting combustion instability

[00:42:11]
in there. You'd have good burning in one part, good mixing and burning in one part of the--

[00:42:16]
and you'd get waves, standing waves set up, so that you'd have hot spots -- things like that.

{SPEAKER name="KONRAD DANNENBERG"}
And I never had anything to do with that motor, that was the size I knew, designed and built already in Kummersdorf.

[00:42:28]
It was tested finally in Peenemünde, in the A-5s of course, ja? So when I got into the act, we only worked on the A-4.


{SPEAKER name="MICHAEL NEUFELD"}
So that the first thing that you saw was --
[00:42:43]