FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE By WOLFGANG SAXON Rudolf Franz Hoelker, a member of Wernher von Braun's original team of rocket engineers, died on June 21 in Newton, Mass. He was 91 and lived in Wellesley. Trained as a mathematician, Dr. Hoelker worked on the trajectory aspect of the guidance system that steered the Saturn rockets on the Apollo moon flights. He was among the scientists who in 1945 accompanied von Braun from Germany to the United States and what is now NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. He was born in Halle in Westphalia, Germany, and studied mathematics, physics and mathematical logic at the University of Münster, where he also taught and received his doctorate. He worked with von Braun on the German rocket program at Peenemünde. In Huntsville, Dr. Hoelker rose to chief of the astrodynamics and guidance theory division in the aero-astrodynamics laboratory. In 1965 he became senior scientist at the NASA electronics research center in Cambridge, Mass., and retired in 1973. In recent months, his family said, he worked privately on the mathematical problems involving a redesign of the space shuttle for a safe re-entry and landing. Dr. Hoelker is survived by his wife of 55 years, Anneliese Wibben Hoelker; a daughter, Melanie Milde, of Wellesley; two sisters, Caecilia Niederlechner of Kempten, Germany, and Elisabeth H. Jones of Concord, Calif.; and one grandson. [Return to Media:Luna™ Headlines...]
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