Part VI: Their Supporting Cast
    In those heady first days of space flight--1959 and the early 60's,--a stellar crew of leading lights illuminated Huntsville. President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and Vice-President LBJ all took their turns on the hustings. William Shockley was a member of our NASA-Headquarters Electric Propulsion Committee, along with Win Bostick (of Bostick Button fame), John Luce from Oak Ridge, John Teem from Harvard and the Caltech physics department, and Edward Teller from Los Alamos. Dr. Raether (developer of the quadrupole mass spectrometer) and I ate lunch and discussed ionic propulsion with Luis Alvarez. And so forth. I'm pretty sure that someone like Teller, and certainly Enrico Fermi and John von Neumann would have had high IQ's. We also had a cadre of young German mathematicians and physicists who would have been Germany's intellectual creme de la creme. A few of them, like Harry Ruppe (from East Berlin) and Heintz Koelle, from the "Forschungs Institute für Physics der Strahlentriebe", lacked Ph. D.'s, but they were just so smart! (I saw Harry Ruppe on TV not too long ago.)
    Among the German "longhairs" were Dr. Erwin Fehlberg, whom you'll find in numerical analysis text books as the originator of the Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg numerical integration algorithm, and Dr. Richard A. Shultz-Arenstorf. Dr. Arenstorf had received his Ph. D. from the University of Gottingen under the aegis of the mathematician who held the Gaussian Chair of Mathematics at that time. (Dr. Hermann Weyl had relinquished the Chair when fled Germany in 1932.) Dr. Arenstorf didn't publish a paper for ten or fifteen years after he was awarded his Ph. D. I asked him why one day, and he explained that he didn't want to submit a paper until he had something that he considered worthy of publication. He was working on the three-body problem. He finally did publish some papers and landed a professorship in the math department at Vanderbilt. The days of the Deutsch were drawing to a close at MSFC and all the young Turks whom the German cadre had imported from Europe were scrambling to find other jobs (although I think Dr. Arenstorf marched to a different drum)..