Willibald Peter Prasthofer
Austrian scientist (1917-1993)
Willibald Peter Prasthofer (17 May 1917 – 30 July 1993) was an Austrian rocket scientist and educator.
With the anschluss of Austria with Germany prior to the second world war, he was conscripted to Peenemünde to work on the fledgeling rocket program headed by Wernher von Braun.
After the war, he worked for the French government missile program in Vernon, Eure (1947-1955), as well as participating in missile testing in Saharan Africa. After returning to Graz, Austria to teach, he was recruited by the U.S. Army to rejoin the German rocket team in Huntsville, Alabama, and with the formation of NASA, worked for the space agency on systems design and rocket propulsion and guidance. He also served as U.S. representative to the Paris air show.
Following his retirement from NASA in 1983, he taught engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville until his retirement in 1992. He continued to serve as lecturer at the Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket center in Huntsville until his death.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8021343. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1917, 1993, 1947 and 1955.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willibald Peter Prasthofer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.