Gerhard Reisig was born March 3, 1910, in Leipzig, Germany. Reisig obtained foundational knowledge for his career as an engineer and physicist at his elementary school, Nikolai Schule. The Nikolai Schule was located in his hometown of Leipzig, and from there he moved on to college and obtained his bachelor of science degree in engineering at the Technical University in Dresden, Germany. In 1934, Reisig continued his education and interest in engineering and physics by earning his PhD at the University of Braunschweig, Germany. In 1937, Gerhard Reisig was hired by Wernher von Braun at Peenemünde, the German Army Research Center developing the V-2 ballistic missile. As the Nazi party gained more and more political power, eventually all of the government contractors, including the members of Werner von Braun’s rocket team, were coerced into joining for fear of losing their livelihoods or lives should they have gone against Hitler’s regime. After Von Braun’s team was commandeered by American forces as the U.S. searched for Germany’s production plants for the ballistic missiles, most of the rocket team were secretly moved to the United States. There at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, and later the Marshall Space Flight Center, Reisig continued working for von Braun until his retirement. Reisig was very well suited for his work at NASA after all of the experience he had gained from his time in the engineering industry at Siemens Co. in Berlin. There, his work had focused on telemetry and wiring. The experience he gained working at Peenemünde focused on physics and aerodynamics. Once actually in the United States, Reisig, von Braun, and the other members of the team eventually developed the Aggregat 5 ballistic missile. Reisig also helped with the Sounding Rocket program at the Marshall Space Flight Center. This program focused on launching a rocket to space to record measurements and data about space. Reisig’s data collecting Sounding Rocket was huge for NASA, because by this point they were developing research for the future space flights that would eventually carry human passengers. The technology Reisig and von Braun developed for the A5 rocket was put into the Saturn V’s launch vehicle. The Saturn V’s launch on November 9, 1967, marked the first launch of the most powerful rocket at the time. Eventually, Saturn V would launch the Apollo 11, taking Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts to the Moon. So important was the development of Werner Von Braun’s rocket team that it shaped the history of NASA and space flight forever. After retiring from the Marshall Space Flight Center and von Braun’s rocket team, Reisig continued to teach what he loved. He was an expert in missile guidance, telemetry, and control, and so he taught as a visiting professor of aerodynamics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Aerophysics Research Center on Redstone Arsenal. Later, Reisig also taught at Concordia College in Moorehead, Minnesota, as a professor of physics. Until about a year before Gerhard Reisig’s death in 2005, he was still lecturing and teaching. He even authored a comprehensive history of rocket technology. Gerhard Reisig is buried in Huntsville, Alabama, at Maple Hill Cemetery with his wife, Gisela Reisig.