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Dec 26

San Antonio engineering technician who helped pioneer the space program dies at 85 – San Antonio Express-News

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Ewald Koegel, an engineering technician who was among a group of scientists and researchers at Brooks AFB that helped develop the critical life-support systems for astronauts in space, has died in Heidelberg, Germany.

He was 85.

He was such a unique man with a fantastic story of coming to America and making something out of literally nothing, said his son, Karl Koegel, 56, a San Antonio Realtor. Not even knowing the language.

The elder Koegel came to the United States from Germany for a job at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1950s after the father of a woman he had been seeing told him the relationship wouldn't work.

The problem: He was Catholic and the mans daughter, Doris, was Lutheran.

Heartbroken, he came to the United States with $100 in his pocket.

Though he wasnt part of the highly secret Operation Paperclip, which scooped up more than 1,600 scientists, engineers, and technicians as the Soviet Union scoured postwar Europe for the same people, Koegel knew Germans who were brought to America.

Koegel ended up in San Antonio after being drafted into the Army. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's brother, Milton, who headed Johns Hopkins, arranged for him to enter the Air Force instead, allowing him to be stationed initially at Randolph AFB, starting in 1957. Along the way, he became a U.S. citizen.

One of the Germans also at Randolph was Hubertus Strughold, who became known as the father of American space medicine but fell into controversy over his Nazi past.

On ExpressNews.com: S.A. was a military air hub from early flight to space

Strughold and Koegel established storied careers at the Air Forces School of Aerospace Medicine, previously called the School of Aviation Medicine and which moved from Randolph to Brooks in 1959.

They helped pioneer the manned space program, starting with the first monkeys that flew in tests predating Alan Shepards historic suborbital mission May 1, 1961.

Koegel was an engineering technician in the schools fabrication branch that produced many innovative and experimental space devices. Rudy Purificato, a Randolph historian, said skilled machinists, engineers and craftsmen manned metal, woodworking, plating, welding, plastics and glassblowing shops.

As the first satellites were launched and work began in earnest to put men into space, Brooks became a research hub for NASA. Koegel and others there also developed other path-breaking technologies that included an artificial heart valve, but they were best known for their critical role in space flight.

Doctors at the research base examined astronauts starting in the Mercury era, and those going into space spent time in Brooks centrifuge, one of them John Glenn prior to his space shuttle flight in 1998. The first American to orbit the earth, he became the worlds oldest space traveler at 77.

Three fellow German scientists, Dr. Hans-Georg Clamann, Fritz Haber and his brother, Heinz, designed and developed the first space capsule cabin simulator using a low-altitude pressure chamber at Brooks in 1954.

That work would pay off during the Apollo 13 crisis when NASA turned to Brooks for data on carbon dioxide buildup in the capsule.

Brooks researchers later developed pressure suits used in the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs.

The German scientists at the School of Aerospace Medicine were way ahead, years ahead of anyone else working on space medicine research, Purificato said. The truth is NASA really depended on the Air Force and the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph and Brooks during the early years of the manned space flight program.

On ExpressNews.com: At 97. scientist is last of old breed at former Brooks AFB

Before NASA sent men into space, it did crucial work testing pressurized capsules using primates, a task that required the fabrication shop.

The primates were tucked into a cylindrical life support system Koegel called a couch, and was similar in some ways to the seats Mercury astronauts like Shepard and Glenn would later fly in as they blasted into space.

We made the couch for Sam out of fiberglass, Koegel recalled, referring to a device that protected the rhesus monkey during its Dec. 4, 1959, space journey aboard a 55-foot-long Little Joe solid-fuel rocket.

The missions aim was to learn whether suborbital flight affected the heart and central nervous system. Called Sam Space, for the School of Aerospace Medicine, the monkey was the first of four primates NASA launched into space prior to Shepards ballistic launch outside the planets atmosphere aboard a Mercury capsule mounted on a Redstone booster.

Koegels couch helped served three purposes, Purificato wrote in his 1999 history book, From the Lab to the Moon. It was the animals pressure suit, performance test chamber and restraint. The lightweight device was mounted inside a cylindrical Plexiglas and steel container called a biopack.

The biopack contained an oxygen bottle, regulator and carbon dioxide absorbers.

The fabrication shop also built a biopack for Miss Sam, a female rhesus monkey who became Americas second primate in space on Jan. 21, 1960.

Similar devices helped Ham and Enos become Americas first space chimps. Ham survived up to 17Gs during his Jan. 31, 1961, suborbital flight aboard a Mercury-Redstone missile, while Enos cruised through two earth orbits aboard a Mercury-Atlas rocket on Nov. 29, 1961.

We had as many as 20 people working in fabrication, Koegel said of the era, which Purificatos history book called Brooks golden age of supporting the space program.

On ExpressNews.com: Fifty years ago, Apollo 8 sent a lunar Christmas message

Koegel held seven patents and worked even when he wasnt at the base. In the evening, he was a consultant to doctors and engineers needing prototype designs.

Hed come home from Brooks at 5:30 p.m., nap for an hour, eat and then work on his lathe until 11, often employing Karl as his apprentice as they produced a breathing valve used in exercise studies.

A 1983 Navy Experimental Diving Unit paper refers to the device as a Koegel valve.

It was incredible to see this man work. I grew up making the patented silicon leaflets that fit inside the valves Y- or T-shaped Plexiglass body, which he turned and threaded on his lathe and then polished and packaged, all by hand, one by one, Karl said. I remember keeping him company as a kid, standing on a stool pushing the on and off button on the lathe.

Still, there were other pursuits. Koegel loved soccer and other competitive sports and was an avid tennis player. On Sundays, hed compete in soccer matches at Olmos Field with German, Italian, Irish, Hungarian and British players.

After retiring from Brooks, Koegel visited friends and family in Germany and lived there six to eight months a year. He reunited with Doris, the woman he wanted to marry so long ago, and spent the last nine years of his life with her.

While there, he suffered a heart attack and died Nov. 25. Services are pending. Koegel, an Air Force veteran, will be buried in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. He is also survived by a daughter, Erica Lara, and numerous grandchildren.

The era of space flight, and Brooks role in shaping the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs that conquered the moon, was inspirational for Koegel, who spoke with first lady Jacqueline Kennedy when she and the president came to Brooks on Nov. 21, 1963.

There, at Building 150, John F. Kennedy made his famous cap over the wall speech the day before his assassination in Dallas. Part of a dedication of Brooks $26 million Aerospace Medical Division complex, the speech was among the presidents last official acts.

My friends, this nation has tossed its cap over the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it, Kennedy told 10,000 people at Brooks, now a residential and commercial hub.

In his 1999 history, Purificato detailed Koegels contributions to the space program, starting in 1959 with the School of Aerospace Medicines work to support Project Mercury.

Brooks, he said, was the center of the universe for the Air Force research in space medicine. It was the place. Of the world-class scientists from all over the country, Brooks had the majority of these scientists working there in space medicine research, primarily.

Koegel modestly said Brooks researchers certainly contributed quite a bit to the program in those years, but echoed Purificatos view that it was an extraordinary time for the base.

Those were glorious days, he said, when we had leaders with vision.

Sig Christenson covers the military and its impact in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Sig, become a subscriber. sigc@express-news.net | Twitter: @saddamscribe

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San Antonio engineering technician who helped pioneer the space program dies at 85 - San Antonio Express-News

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