After being brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip, he developed guidance systems with Wernher von Braun's team for the US Army, and later was a scientist with NASA.

[7] Despite showing promise as a scientist, in 1941 Stuhlinger was drafted as a private in the German Army and sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded during the Battle of Moscow.

[8] Upon reaching German territory in 1943, Stuhlinger was ordered to the rocket development center in Peenemünde where he joined Dr. Wernher von Braun's team.

[9] Stuhlinger was one of the first group of 126 scientists who emigrated to the United States with von Braun after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip.

For the next decade, Stuhlinger and other von Braun team members worked on Army missiles, but they also devoted efforts in building an unofficial space capability.

This satellite discovered the Van Allen radiation belt through a cosmic ray sensor, a felicitous intersection with his early physics expertise, included in a science package supervised by Stuhlinger.

In 1970, shortly after the first lunar landing, Stuhlinger received a letter from Sister Mary Jucunda in Zambia, Africa, asking how billions of dollars could be spent for space research when so many children on the Earth were starving to death.

After retiring from NASA in January 1976, Stuhlinger became an adjunct professor and senior research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), holding this position for the next 20 years.

Starting in 1990, Stuhlinger and Frederick I. Ordway III collaborated on the two-volume biography Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space (Krieger Publishing, 1994).

[17][18]Stuhlinger was interviewed in 1984 by fellow Operation Paperclip scientist Konrad Dannenberg and UAH professor Donald Tarter for an oral history series.