Germany’s space odyssey

Earthbound concerns took precedence as Germany, divided into East and West where the western powers had butted up against the advancing troops of the Red Army, sought to come to terms with defeat, shattered cities and the shocking revelation of the Holocaust. The last thing on the minds of defeated and starving Germans was putting humans, or indeed anything at all, into space. The collective shame of the German people – encapsulated in the word Kollektivschuld which, alongside Vergangenheitsbewältigung meaning “overcoming the past”, has come to define the postwar mindset of the nation – meant that most rejected any associations with the atrocities of the second world war, however tenuous. And that, of course, included research into rocketry, which was directly associated with the Nazi military machine.

Only a dedicated few had any inclination or indeed imperative to restart Germany’s once pre-eminent role. “It was start-from-scratch time,” explains Colleen Anderson, curator of rocketry and researcher into the postwar German space programme at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. “And they were bound by a moratorium placed on German rocketry by the allies who had seen first-hand how it could be used for military purposes.”

Yet, despite such an inauspicious reboot, Germany today has a thriving space industry. “Ask the average German about their nation’s space programme, and they look at you surprised,” says Anderson. “Very few even know it exists.” But exist it does, and along the way it has notched up remarkable successes, with Germany arguably becoming Europe’s pre-eminent nation in space, alongside France.

“In the late 1940s, early 1950s, the only way for Germans still living in Germany to research or work in the space industry was for them to be part of an international collaboration, as a way of getting around the moratorium,” explains Anderson. In 1947 in West Germany, a young student from Stuttgart, Hermann Koelle, re-established the Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung, a society set up with the intention of cooperating with space societies around the world, such as the British Interplanetary Society and the US’s American Rocket Society. 

Meanwhile, Eugen Sänger, an Austrian aerospace engineer who had worked on rocket and jet propulsion during the war, had been taken to France following the German surrender. There he founded the International Astronautical Federation. After he resisted first the exhortations of the Soviet Union to work with them, and later a kidnap attempt, in 1954 he returned to Stuttgart. And, as the war – and any fear of a repeat – receded into the background, the moratorium on German space projects was lifted as part of the Bonn-Paris Conventions in 1955. This freed Sänger to become professor of air and spaceflight at the Technical University of Berlin. From these early organisations eventually arose the German Aerospace Centre, the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, or DLR, now located in Cologne.

Over the Berlin Wall in East Germany, spaceflight began to be seen as symbolic of a new future rather than the west’s rather more pragmatic adoption of the present, just one benefit, its government believed, of an ideological socialist system that would drive humankind onwards. As a satellite state of the Soviet Union, however, East Germany’s limited space research resources tended to be requisitioned by Moscow. However, the Soviets allowed captured German rocketry engineers – who had been kept pretty much apart from their Russian counterparts lest they learn too much about the Soviet space programme – to return to East Germany. 

This wasn’t so much the case in the west. German scientists working for the US had experienced more freedom to pursue their work and were pretty much settled – and well paid – where they were. The likes of Wernher von Braun would go on to play significant roles at Nasa and in the Apollo moon landings. “East Germany might have had experienced engineers,” says Anderson, “but they had far fewer opportunities to put anything into practice.” 

Over in the west, Sänger was proving to be an astute figurehead, and in 1962 West Germany was invited by the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) to build the third stage of its Europa rocket launcher intended to take European satellites into orbit. The British were to build the first stage – a leftover from the abandoned Blue Streak missile programme, which had been cancelled two years before – the French the second. Europa was an abject failure, for want of a better term, as were its proposed successors. Fortunately for West Germany, better days lay ahead. 

Sänger would, in 1965, be superseded by Koelle, who had returned from working with Nasa. The two were instrumental in leading West German space research away from its Nazi roots and forging the successes that would follow. “Koelle was a notable engineer on the Apollo programme, working on the Saturn V rocket and the beginnings of the Skylab space station,” says Anderson. “But he missed out on the launches to return home.” Writer and former Nasa curator Frank Winter describes Koelle as “the most important German rocket scientist you’ve never heard of.” He would remain in post until 1991.

As ELDO morphed into the European Space Research Association – which eventually led to Germany’s first successful satellite launch in 1968 – and then into the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1975, German participation in the Ariane satellite launcher began at the behest of the French, who weren’t especially keen on relying on other nations such as the US for their satellite programme. “While willing to play a role, the Germans also didn’t want to burn bridges with Nasa,” explains Anderson. “So in the end they did both, working with ESA on Ariane and concurrently with Nasa on Spacelab, a laboratory for experiments on the space shuttle.” It was a wise move; both programmes were very successful. “These were without doubt two great achievements of the postwar West German space programme,” says Anderson. 

Now on its fifth iteration, the Ariane launcher has sent more than 250 payloads into orbit, and most recently carried the new James Webb Space Telescope into space. More significantly, it brought German expertise to the attention of Nasa as it looked for partners to work on Spacelab. Nasa needed a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the space shuttle. West German-manufactured modules were used for 16 missions between 1983 and 1988, notching up 181 days in space, and enabling 110 astronauts to work on more than 700 experiments.

So fruitful was West Germany’s partnership with Nasa that when the Challenger shuttle launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October 1985, for the first time scientific operations were run from outside the US, from Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich. The mission was designated D1 (Deutschland 1).  

Two of the astronauts on D1 were West Germans – Ernst Messerschmid and Reinhard Furrer – and in 1993 two more – Hans Schlegel and Ulrich Walter – would fly on Mission D2. All four had, however, been beaten into space by their compatriot Ulf Merbold, who in 1983 flew on the shuttle Columbia, the first non-American to fly on a Nasa spacecraft. 

D1 and D2 were the only two Spacelab shuttle missions controlled from outside the US. Oberpfaffenhofen remains open and is today used by ESA.

Over the Berlin Wall, however, East Germany had already hailed what to the regime was a greater achievement than Ariane or Spacelab. The nation had sent the first German into space, a full five years before Merbold. 

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the East German engineers who had returned from the Soviet Union had been ploughing their research furrow somewhat under the radar. And while resources for a genuine space programme were scarce, spaceflight became a subject embedded in the ideology of the nation. Astronomy was a mandatory class in schools, and the Pioneers (the eastern bloc equivalent of the west’s Scouts and Guides) ran space camps where children dressed as cosmonauts simulated missions and launched small rockets. “Soviet cosmonauts visited frequently,” says Anderson. “There were mosaics of spaceflight in towns and much art and imagery based on what spaceflight could offer the nation and socialism.”

The enthusiasm was such that the state diverted precious money and materials to making space films. The 1960 East German science fiction movie Der schweigende Stern (or “The Silent Star”), depicting space travellers landing on Venus, used all the glue available in the country to create its sets, according to the film’s director, Kurt Maetzig. Homes, businesses and schools had to go without.

In 1967 the Soviet Union introduced the Interkosmos programme, which invited eastern bloc nations and other allies to contribute to its initiatives in space. East Germany’s contribution was the Zeiss company’s MKF-6 multispectral camera for measuring light wavelengths. Its remote sensing of the Earth’s surface meant it had a number of geographical applications: determining metrics from forest density to pollution levels. “It was remarkably successful and was in use from 1976 to the 1980s,” says Anderson. “The images it produced were requested by nations around the world plus the UN and the World Bank. The Soviets insisted that it was not used for spying, but because the film had to be returned to Earth via the Soviet Union they saw the photos first and most often never passed them on.”

“Nonetheless it brought kudos to East Germany,” says Anderson. “So when the crews for the Soviet Union’s Salyut space stations were being selected, as a reward East Germany got its first cosmonaut.” Only citizens of four other nations had flown in space before: the Soviet Union, the United States, Poland and Czechoslovakia. “It was an extraordinary feat for a small country,” she adds, “quite the propaganda coup, especially, of course, because they beat West Germany into space. ‘Here is what socialism can achieve’ was the message.”

Sigmund Jähn flew aboard Soyuz 31 to Salyut 6 in 1978 with items carefully selected by his government: an East German flag (naturally), a photo of East German premier Erich Honecker (taped next to Lenin’s picture inside the station) and a copy of the classic German legend Faust (to symbolise that East Germany was the genuine embodiment of the German nation).

“The East Germans also added another layer of propaganda,” says Anderson. “In Germany at bedtime, parents tell children the Sandman will be visiting to ensure they go to sleep. And both nations had their own TV shows depicting him. But the East Germans were able to show that ‘their’ Sandman had flown to Salyut and took great pleasure in beaming the show over the Berlin Wall for West German kids to watch.”

Jähn would be the only East German cosmonaut. The Soviet Union was fast running out of money. But he would play one more role in the history of the German space programme. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 he acted as a bridge across space programmes in newly unified Germany, putting his country in the unique position of being able to run its satellite and other programmes with both Nasa and Russia.

However, as with most governmental departments after 1989, the smaller East German space institutions were quickly subsumed into West German counterparts, and by the time the 40th anniversary of Jähn’s flight rolled around in 2018, very few Germans had any idea who he was. The Museum of Technology in Berlin ran an exhibition about his flight that year in an attempt to raise awareness of his achievement. “But even then there was a certain attitude among some Germans that this doesn’t really count as an achievement by ‘real’ Germany,” says Anderson. “And if you look back at West German newspapers from the time of his flight, it was barely mentioned.” 

Jähn, however, did later achieve a modicum of fame via a rather esoteric route. He appears as a faux character in the award-winning 2003 comedy-drama movie Good Bye Lenin! directed by Wolfgang Becker. Attempting to convince his dying mother, a lifelong devotee of East German socialism, that the revolution which dissolved her nation in 1989 never happened, her son persuades a taxi driver who resembles Jähn to act in a fake news report reassuring her all is well. “Ironically, this is how many Germans today think of Sigmund Jähn,” says Anderson.

Since the shuttle ceased flying and Interkosmos shut its doors after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the DLR has contented itself with collaborations with ESA and Nasa, providing technology for any number of programmes including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, the comet-exploring Rosetta spacecraft, and launching the Galileo satellite array. 

But in 2007 government minister Peter Heintze and the DLR announced an ambitious plan to put a spacecraft into lunar orbit. The Lunar Exploration Orbiter (LEO) was planned to launch in 2012. 

Some commentators pointed out that it would operate a mere 50km above the lunar surface. Was it perhaps a prelude to Germany sending humans to the moon? Well, maybe. LEO has yet to fly, the initial cost of €350m constantly increasing and being diverted elsewhere. “It appears to be in perpetual hiatus,” says Anderson. 

But if and when it does, the achievements of Ariane, Spacelab, and even Sigmund Jähn might be eclipsed. Perhaps the best is yet to come.