Eberhard Rees, a German-born rocket engineer who in 1970 succeeded Wernher von Braun as the chief of American rocketry efforts, died Thursday in a De Land area hospital. He was 89 and had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.
From their early years in Germany through NASA’s successes with manned lunar landings, Mr. Rees was regarded as the top deputy to von Braun, the mastermind of the United States space program.
Mr. Rees, who had the German equivalent of a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, directed teams of German and American experts in the competitive years that saw the birth and launch of rockets and the 1969 manned space flight to the moon.
For his role in the Apollo 11 mission, Mr. Rees received a Distinguished Service Medal from NASA.
Mr. Rees also played important roles in the design of the Saturn family of space-launching vehicles, including the Saturn 1, Saturn 1B and Saturn 5, the first crafts to be designed and developed specifically for space flight.
He succeeded von Braun as director of NASA’s George Marshall Space Center at Huntsville, Ala., in 1970 and retired in 1973.
“He was a prime mover in the Saturn Apollo program. He had an innate ability to be a superb engineer. He had the knack to get to the point of an engineering problem quickly,” said William Lucas, who became director at the Marshall Center after Mr. Rees. “He was a pioneer in one of the most significant engineering achievements of all times.”
Lucas said Mr. Rees had an intuitive sense of aeronautics, rather than formal education in the field. In fact, aerospace engineering did not exist when his team put the first rockets in space in the ’50s, but Mr. Rees learned a new field as he helped solve immense and novel problems.
In one case, Mr. Rees’ team had to learn how to cope with the tremendous heat generated by re-entry of a space vehicle moving at supersonic speeds. The team solved the problem, and in August 1957, NASA’s demonstration rocket carrying a nose cone went aloft, re-entered the atmosphere and reached its target intact.
Mr. Rees was born in Trossingen, Germany, and studied at the Dresden Institute of Technology, graduating in 1934 with his master’s degree. He worked at a steel mill in Leipzig, gaining experience as a manager of technology.
In 1940, he began to work with rockets as technical plant manager for the German Guided Missile Center in Peenemunde.
Near the end of World War II, he was one of 118 German scientists who surrendered to the West and were taken to England, and later to El Paso, Texas. Ultimately they were put to work in the U.S. rocket effort.
