Following WWII, a plan to use a Nazi rocket to put a Briton in space

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150824-how-a-nazi-rocket-could-have-put-a-briton-in-space

by williamhpark • 11 years ago

54 41 11 years ago

nbevans5• 11 years ago

The BBC has done several TV documentaries over the years about this. Interesting stuff. Equally interesting was the race to break the sound barrier where a bizarre scenario unfolded of the British inventing it but the Americans flying it first (after the Brits shared the design).

outworlder• 11 years ago

So, just like the WW2 radar?

jand3• 11 years ago

Could you please change the title to be less clickbaity?

A Nazi rocket... as opposed to communism rockets and god-fearing, democracy rockets?

Please.

nbevans5• 11 years ago

Then the BBC article is just as clickbaity so you'll be needing this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/contact_us/making_a_complaint....

PhasmaFelis• 11 years ago

The submission rephrases the BBC's title, so there's not even the excuse that it's just quoting it.

(And in any case it's not just hyperbolic, it's a lie. A rocket based on a modification of a German design, but designed and built in Britain, cannot be reasonably considered a "German rocket," let alone a "Nazi rocket.")

jand3• 11 years ago

Well... no. I am no BBC regular, but an HN regular.

JupiterMoon• 11 years ago

It is worth doing this. We pay our license fee specifically so that we get a non-commercial public interest broadcaster (i.e. in this case non-clickbait article titles).

(OK we pay our license fee because otherwise some nasty people take us to court with a criminal charge -- but some of use don't mind paying our license fee because of the whole public service broadcaster thing.)

NLips• 11 years ago

'Nazi rocket' is from the original title (although for some reason the title here has been subtly changed - from "How a Nazi rocket could have put a Briton in space").

It's also a specific and potentially interesting piece of information, as opposed to 'communism rockets'. It refers to a specific regime, like someone referring to a 'Roman sword'.

williamhpark• 11 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out. I left 'Nazi rocket' in as I felt it was essential to the point of the article: A story about clamour to obtain wartime tech to repurpose for space exploration.

The reason for the change is simple. The one misleading term in the title is the word 'Briton'. A Briton is not a British person, but rather an archaic term for a Celtic person who inhabited ancient Britain.

I thought it would be FAR more click-baity to suggest an ancient Celt tried to reach space in a rocket.

kryptiskt• 11 years ago

It was a Nazi rocket through and through, built by slave labor at the Mittelwerk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk) and serving as one of Hitler's vengeance weapons. No need to whitewash it.

arethuza4• 11 years ago

I remember reading that the V2 was a weapon where more people were killed producing it than were killed by it.

garagemc2• 11 years ago

Totally predictable ending.

The potential for this country to get advanced technology well ahead of it's time getting rejected by bureaucrats because of other priorities (or really it serves none of their short term goals).

The same thing happened with our fibre network in the early 90's.

nbevans5• 11 years ago

If it wasn't for xDSL broadband the UK would have been utterly screwed in the early 2000s. So yeah, thanks Sweden!

gambiting• 11 years ago

"The potential for this country to get advanced technology well ahead of it's time getting rejected by bureaucrats" well I would say that right after the war there really were more important things to do rather than putting people into space.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

That's not really true. The UK led the world in aerospace until the mid-50s. If the lead had been kept rather than squandered it would have provided a huge boost to the economy.

The UK could have owned the launch business, and also owned much of the satellite business. It would also have been the first country with ICBMs, which would have changed the balance of power significantly.

There was a serious failure of imagination in Whitehall. Or possibly serious pressure from Washington.

And it happened again and again - as with the cancelled TSR2 project, and more recently with the bizarre decision to buy the F35 for the UK's new carriers, which means they'll have no planes on them for a good 5-10 years.

It's also fair to say the Nazi engineers were even further ahead. By the end of WWII German aerospace was maybe ten years in front of everyone else, with not entirely unrealistic plans for ocean-crossing jets and ICBMs.

If Germany hadn't been run by a psychopath, German technology might be where the US is today.

raverbashing• 11 years ago

To be fair, with limited resources, investing in aviation and nuclear was a better choice

People love to ask for regulation and more bureaucracy then complain when things don't go where they want it

well ahead of it's time

"its", not "it's"

arethuza4• 11 years ago

The BBC did a rather splendid pair of documentaries on the technological lead the UK had in aviation after WW2 - "Cold War, Hot Jets":

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03hhm6z

creshal• 11 years ago

Britain was still on war-time food rationing in '47. I really can't blame them.

spacecowboy_lon• 11 years ago

That was down to thatcher BT had the plans for a nationwide fiber roil out but Government did not want an ex public body to succeed.

Gravityloss• 11 years ago

There was a UK rocket that launched a few satellites to orbit. UK is the only country in the world to have have given up space access that it had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow

quarterto2• 11 years ago

launched a few satellites to orbit

*a single satellite. The first two launches were suborbital tests; the third launch carried Orba, but failed to reach orbit. Only the fourth and final launch, with Prospero as the payload, successfully reached orbit.

JackFr• 11 years ago

Well in fairness, Britain did OK with that whole steam engine thing.

dexen• 11 years ago

Ministry of Space [1] is a what-if short comics series by Warren Ellis, tellsing the very story of Britain being the first to launch into space thanks to V-2 tech. As expected of Ellis, it's full of references to the british culture and customs; even the rocket tech design has semblance to actual british air and space hardware.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Space

exar0815• 11 years ago

Fun thing, some danish guys are trying to do exactly that. They are running a private space program in some sheds in the Copenhagen harbor, using mainly off-the-shelf parts and donations to keep going. As they once stated, they dont want to reinvent the wheel, so they usd freely available plans for rockets - which, incidentially only were the plans for the A4 rocket and engine. With this, they want to put a human in space, making Denmark the fourth country to achieve it worldwide.

Oh, and they also own a submarine.

http://copenhagensuborbitals.com

arethuza4• 11 years ago

I was reading "Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute" and they mention Von Braun and his biographical movie "I Aim at the Stars" - he claimed that his wartime work was really motivated by a desire to work on space travel.

Some wit thought the movie should perhaps have been called "I Aim at the Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London)".

bhaak• 11 years ago

I have no problem believing that he only wanted to aim at the stars. But only his will wouldn't have launched that rockets. He needed an infrastructure and money. And at the time, it was only in Germany that he got this.

He was the right man at the right place at the right time in the wrong political environment. He used the Nazi politics for his own means and as soon as it was obvious he dumped them for the Americans.

I don't know if has been translated but there is a great documentary from German television called "Der Raketenmann" (the rocket man) which depicts von Braun's life more critically than "I Aim at the Stars".

Tuna-Fish• 11 years ago

An absolute classic on the subject by Tom Lehrer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio&t=11

compostor42• 11 years ago

he claimed that his wartime work was really motivated by a desire to work on space travel.

Reminds me of Gerald Bull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull

He just wanted to build his space gun. He had no qualms about building artillery for Saddam Hussein if it meant his efforts would get funded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXgtNqCe9Ko

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun

SFjulie1• 11 years ago

When you see how much USA and commonwealth have Me 163 komet, Me262, volksjager there is no wonder how USA got its spatial program. It must have been true that for some years there should have been NYIFO being tested in the skys near USAF bases: Not Yet Identified Flying Objects.

Look where the remaining planes are located: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet

You can add, it was nice of them exfiltrating the poor scientists that could have been unfairly implicated in war crimes.

It is obvious all industrial powers that could try to get the nazi's technology did: Russia, UK included...

Whatever the way you call it: a nazi rocket indeed helped made a man/dog/monkey the first man/dog/monkey in space.

hadeharian• 11 years ago

The Nazi rockets blew up too many times. They would have killed at least 10 men trying to leave the atmosphere, and then killed one leaving the atmosphere.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

What is too many? Same could be said of flight, or steam engines, or probably ancient seafaring canoes. As long as folks keep volunteering, its not too many.

cc438• 11 years ago

The basic design of the A4 engine in the V-2 was a sound concept. The reliability of wartime production was held back by the deteriorating conditions and post-war testting was held back by the aging of the captured components. The US and UK used nothing but captured parts, preferring to iterate on the original design rather than build new components for an old rocket.

The US took their testing data and combined it with the fruits of Operation Paperclip's R&D to create the Redstone program. The Rocketdyne A7 engine was a direct successor of the A4 and was reliable enough to put the first US astronauts in orbit during the Mercury-Redstone program.

In short, an A4/V-2 would have been reliable enough to serve as the foundation of a British space program as long as it was built to spec without the material substitutions carried out due to wartime shortages.

dalke2• 11 years ago

(Minor correction: Mercury-Redstone put US astronauts in space but was suborbital.)

dalke2• 11 years ago

The article says "Instead, the spaceman (and only a man was considered) would have been launched on a parabolic trajectory some 300,000 metres above the Earth."

I think that's a mistake. The V2 had a range of about 300 km ("For the V-2 rocket, just reaching space but with a range of about 330 km, the maximum speed was 1.6 km/s" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-orbital_spaceflight#Speed.... ).

The BBC article goes on to quote “Megaroc was essentially the Mercury-Redstone.” From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_Launch_Vehicl... we see that Mercury-Redstone didn't quite make it to 200 km altitude.

According to http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.526 , there have been no suborbital flights above 192 km.

EDIT: Nope, I'm wrong. Megaroc was supposed to get to 304 km (one million feet). http://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/projects/megaroc . Indeed, it appears that the name is short for "Mega[foot]roc[et]."

Following WWII, a plan to use a Nazi rocket to put a Briton in space

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