The strange contagion of a dream

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2611/1

by treeface • 12 years ago

32 2 12 years ago

idlewords• 12 years ago

This is a strange piece of writing. Two things stand out in particular:

First, it paints Von Braun as a visionary hero doing what it took to survive during the war, under pain of death. Von Braun's moral position was much more problematic than this. The best you can say about his stance during the war is that he was not an ideologue, but an opportunist. Holding him up as an example of moral courage is a perversion of history. "I aim at the stars (but sometimes I hit London)." There are excellent biographies of Von Braun that go into rich detail about his conduct during the war.

Second, the article argues that Korolev and Von Braun somehow manipulated their respective countries into funding their dreams of human spaceflight. Given the obvious military applications of rockets that could launch large payloads into orbit, and the huge advantage this technology would give any nuclear power over its rivals, the suggestion that human space flight would not have happened in the 1960's without these dreamers is fantasy.

Military planners at this stage of the Cold War were thinking seriously about armed space stations (and the Soviet Union in fact built one). Moreover, questions of who could put a human being in orbit first, and who could put people on the moon, were universally recognized as prestigious technological achievements with immense propaganda value.

gjm11• 12 years ago

The best you can say about his stance during the war is that he was not an ideologue, but an opportunist.

The best expression known to me of this is Tom Lehrer's song "Wernher von Braun" (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio).

The strange contagion of a dream

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