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.
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.