Guenter Wendt

Guenter F. Wendt ( born August 28, 1924 in Berlin as Guenter Wendt, † May 3, 2010 in Merritt Iceland, Florida ) was a German - American engineer, who from 1967 to 1975, the position of the pad at the Kennedy Space leaders Center held.

Life

Wendt was born in 1924 in Berlin and studied aircraft there. During the Second World War, he was employed as a flight engineer in the Air Force. In 1949 he emigrated to the USA ( as before his father ) and in 1955 a U.S. citizen. Until 1967 he worked for McDonnell Aircraft and was in charge during the Gemini and Mercury missions for the reliable state of the spaceships. After the tragic accident of Apollo 1 Wendt joined the company North American Rockwell, which made ​​the Apollo spaceships. Wendt was responsible for the launch preparations of the manned Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and ASTP missions until 1975 in the position of the pad leaders. So he was the one who adopted the astronauts as the last and locked the hatch of the command capsules. In 1989 he went into retirement after he last took care of the safety of the shuttle missions.

Guenter Wendt was known for his pedantic, but also warm -hearted leadership style and was popular with the astronauts. He was also a consultant on many television and film productions. In 2001 he published his book " The Unbroken Chain ", in which he writes about his time at NASA.

In circles of astronauts spoken with a German accent sentence "I wonder where Guenter Wendt " was ( I wonder where Guenter went. Said Wendt went to went (=) is ) a household word. He went back to a saying of Donn Eisele after locking the Apollo 7 command module. A wide audience of the set by the actor Tom Hanks was known to him who speaks in the movie Apollo 13. In the German synchronization was this: " Guenter Wendt - Who does not know Berlin who has slept through the world ", where the original word game was lost.

Wendt died on May 3, 2010 in his home on Merritt Iceland to the effects of a stroke.