In 1959 Gerhard Eggers returned to Bremen as technical director of Focke-Wulf. The city still bore the scars of the war, but Eggers and his colleagues had a vision: rebuilding the German aviation industry – and German participation in spaceflight.

Founding of Entwicklungsring Nord (ERNO)

When the Anglo-French proposal emerged in the late 1950s to develop a European launcher based on the British Blue Streak and the French Véronique, the Germans were to contribute the third stage. The offer went to Focke-Wulf, Weserflug and Hamburger Flugzeugbau. The leaders of the three firms coordinated and in 1961 founded the Entwicklungsring Nord (ERNO) working group – Eggers was among the initiators together with Dr. Czerwenka, Dr. Seibold and Hans Schneider. Schneider, a rocket specialist of the French SEPR whom Eggers knew from his Paris years, taught the young Bremen engineers the craft of rocketry.

The contemporary witness Hans E. W. Hoffmann, later Spacelab project manager, described in an oral-history interview of the Deutsches Museum how Eggers personally recruited him for spaceflight in 1961 – the first three space engineers in Bremen were initially ridiculed and called „Die drei Gagarins“ (“the three Gagarins”), until the small working group grew into a core centre of German space technology.

Commission for Space Technology

Eggers represented Focke-Wulf in the Commission for Space Technology (KfR), in which, chaired by director F. Rudorf (Dresdner Bank), the Federal Republic’s first space programme was drawn up – alongside him were, among others, Ludwig Bölkow, Eugen Sänger and representatives of Dornier, Daimler-Benz and the major research institutes.

Founding and history of ERNO

On 1 January 1961 the Entwicklungsring Nord (ERNO) was founded as a working group; the core of the team initially consisted of three employees: Winfrid Buhe, Hans Hoffmann and Horst Billig. In 1965 the working group gained the status of an independent company, ERNO Raumfahrttechnik GmbH.

Eggers is thus regarded as one of the pathfinders of the modern space industry in northern Germany: by pooling the competences of north German aviation companies he laid the foundation for a strong European space industry – an important precursor of later alliances such as ESA and the space activities of Airbus.

Its greatest success was winning the Spacelab prime contract in 1974. In 1981 ERNO was absorbed into MBB and later became part of larger groups; the Bremen site – today part of Airbus Defence and Space – remained a major centre of spaceflight.

Vereinigte Flugtechnische Werke (VFW)

On 12 November 1963 Weser-Flugzeugbau and Focke-Wulf merged into Vereinigte Flugtechnische Werke GmbH (VFW) with more than 7,000 employees – about a third of West Germany’s aircraft-building capacity. Eggers became managing director for the development division, alongside Wilhelm Bansemir, Hans Pasche and Dr. Otto Proksch, among others. Fields of work were the development of VTOL aircraft, transport aircraft, helicopters and space equipment. Projects of these years included the VFW 614 and the VAK 191B vertical take-off aircraft.

In 1964 Eggers was appointed honorary professor at TU Berlin and from then on commuted regularly between Bremen and Berlin to lecture on vertical take-off technology.

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