It's also exactly what made nasa in the first place, with America stealing much of rocket science from the Germans in the wake of WW2.
And, in addition, the Germans in the 1930s got a lot of good information from Robert H. Goddard, the inventor who built the first liquid-fueled rocket; Werner von Braun said, about him, "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." There was a large exchange of information in most areas of physics between very illustrious German and American physicists.
I think that having more people doing more science enriches everyone. Without American and German scientists working sharing information, it would have taken a lot longer to have the space technology that we currently do.
That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_c...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_
It's not about rockets in general, but about rocket fuel specifically. It's the "#1 Best Seller in Petroleum (Engineering)" category:
* https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-History-Liquid-Prop...
Is that true? I have read that, unlike the German rocket club, Goddard was very secretive — more like closed-source.
Thanks to the open German rocket club, they solved the engineering difficulty of a high speed pump to deliver fuel to the engines. Goddard appears to have stalled there.
So the U.S. gets the German scientists, some hardware. They seem to have wanted to have both a peaceful, scientific track for rocket research and a military one.
Werner got the military track with the Army. Developing, among other things, the Redstone.
The peaceful, scientific track became NASA when Sputnik circled the Earth. Failing to get their own JPL rockets off the ground, the U.S. turns to the Army .... hey, Werner, anything you can do with your Redstone to help us out here?
That's my take anyhow. Someone with deeper historical knowledge can correct my wild generalizations.
Goddard's early launches were made possible by a Smithsonian grant of $5000 by Charles Greeley Abbot from the Hodgkins fund. After being ridiculed in the NYT in 1920 he got more cautious about PR. After a Lindbergh visit, the Guggenheims helped him find another $100,000.
Germany didn't need 'help' from Goddard; they had Oberth, who did a PhD thesis on rocketry in 1922, and published The Rocket into Planetary Space in 1923. "Space historians typically name three pioneers as the founding fathers of astronautics: Tsiolkovsky [a Russian teachr when Goddard was still a teen], the American Robert Goddard, and the German (although Romanian-born) Hermann Oberth." [1]
[0] https://www.famousscientists.org/robert-goddard/ [1] https://www.airspacemag.com/space/russias-long-love-affair-w...
> That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
You're only saying this because America stopped Germany. You might as well be telling the French why sharing their science with 1930's Germany is a net good. What about a hypothetical where that French 30's science was the defining factor in Germany being able to conquer them?
What % of the scientific community would it take to convince their government to be open about sharing their knowledgebase? seems unrealistic with their current 'climate'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...
To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.
Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.
> We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.
He really write that? That’s some chutzpah.
Also interesting is that the V-2 missile was called a “ vengeance weapon” [0] but Allied bombing of Germany hadn’t started when the V-2 started. [1]
On 22 December 1942, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon", and the Peenemünde group developed it to target London.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_air_operations_during_...
See siblings comments about Mittelwerk, eg. Also Chabon's (fictional) novel Moonglow covers some of this history well.
Not at all the same as what's going on right now [0]
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-az/pr/former-raytheon-engineer-...
It's like when people gave credit to Hitler for infrastructure projects such as the Autobahns which were already in progress before he took office.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/konwyz/starship_sta...
I think the main gripe with China's process is that they don't do the latter. They produce replica's then herald them as original works of the mightiest country on the planet. Everyone everywhere steals, but China does it with a little more 'F-U' than most countries, and tend to use what they steal to oppress.
I spent a few years working for a defense contractor out of college, and Chinese IPs were probing every internet facing server we had 24/7.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knock...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks...
> Industrial Espionage.... > Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.
Pointing it out as a matter of economic and national security is far from a childish thing to do. If you're government is willing to subjugate people into slave labor at a massive scale while at the same time stealing the IP born from fairer societies, that creates an uneven competitive landscape, which ultimately works against the fairer societies. Think of it this way: Safety nets cost money, but the return you get is smarter people taking bigger risks and creating new useful things. If you get all the benefits of that (IP) and don't have to pay, you will win, and create a crappier world in the process. I'd liken it to brain drain. You spend all this money educating people only to have the return on that investment go elsewhere.
I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.
How are all the other countries, who follow US IP laws and trade regulations, pulling themselves out of poverty? Are they doing it as fast as China is?
It is always in the interest of a more developed country to set IP terms, because they own the patents and the manufacturing processes, and they can advantage themselves at the expense of everyone else. Look at how Mexico fared in NAFTA, or what the terms of the TPP were. All of this is completely beside the point of who has a more "fair" or more "just" regime. China did what they needed to do to develop their economy: steal American IP and ignore American trade laws and patents.
Second, the list of underdeveloped countries that care about US IP laws is non-existent. The US doesn't care. It only matters when the country is wealthy and advanced enough to do something with the IP that it matters.
Third, I don't see how it being in the US's interest to protect their IP makes protecting the IP wrong.
Forth, you've rebutted none of my actual points, and ignored my last sentence.
Well, this actually reminded me the case of Apple issued Microsoft for the infringement in 1988 [1], and Apple did not win because the Mac UI was actually 'referenced' from Xerox as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
[1]https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Backgr...
A trivial example: a nephew of mine proudly showed his drawings. They were really fantastic for his age, and everyone told him so. Turns out, he drew them by putting paper on a computer monitor (this was back when CRTs were still the fashion) and tracing. That did change the perception of merit a bit. The difference in the difficulty underlies the difference in appreciation.
To make my stance entirely clear: this is not meant to condone or condemn either side.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/arts/paintings-too-perfec...
T. S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”
Wasn't it an American who said "good artists copy, great artists steal"?
e.g. Soviet Union vs United States.
I like it, I welcome it - it begs to open the purse and spend and brings the most creative solutions to the table.
Like computers, boy what a fad!
China merely isn't just engaged in industrial espionage because it works to not duplicate effort. They steal to undermine the effort of the people that made it possible to begin with. In many cases ruining the companies that made the original innovation. This isnt crying and whinging for no reason it's unethical and wrong. This isnt a two way street where chinese innovations are helping our world. Almost everything the Chinese steal all while burning through natural resources and at alarming pace and injecting the most harmful substances into the environment. And be honest they are simply doing this to saberrattle the US and create propoganda to legitmaze an oppressive state. So, yes it's not only unfair, it's evil. And I'm not happy for China.
None of our inventions arise from a vacuum. Cars are still as wide as Roman chariots for good reason. Power transfer uses the same base principles as were in play during the dawn of steam engines and before. Energy conversion has been an iterative process for centuries, with the odd leap and bound.
Industrial espionage exists because it works, and everyone does it because it's a cheap way to come up to speed with the leading edge of human knowledge rather than unnecessarily duplicating effort.
Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.