News 100th birthday of Wernher von Braun

[FADEC]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora

Happy Birthday

---------- Post added at 09:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:06 PM ----------

Its true, he made the V2 but he was a criminal?

I think that the slave labour in Mittelbau-Dora was a war crime. And Wernher von Braun was aware of it. By receiving the Americans with open arms he killed two birds with one stone: get the chance to continue his rocketry and prevent a criminal prosecution for war crimes (likely during the Nuremberg Trials later).

I honor him (one of many though) for his contributions to space flight. But he also remains a war criminal, although never accused.

 

[Andy44]

Wait, you mean people look the other way and do morally ambiguous things when they live in dictatorships during wars? No way!

---------- Post added at 08:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:28 PM ----------

There are Americans shooting missiles from drones at women and children attending funerals in Pakistan right now. Unlike Von Braun, those people are directly killing people. But they won't ever be famous, and win or lose the US government is not likely to be toppled, so their names are unlikely to come up in discussions about war crimes.

And few if any of them will redeem themselves by building moon rockets. So I think we can cut Wherner a little slack.

 

[Gerdih]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora

Happy Birthday

---------- Post added at 09:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:06 PM ----------



I think that the slave labour in Mittelbau-Dora was a war crime. And Wernher von Braun was aware of it. By receiving the Americans with open arms he killed two birds with one stone: get the chance to continue his rocketry and prevent a criminal prosecution for war crimes (likely during the Nuremberg Trials later).

I honor him (one of many though) for his contributions to space flight. But he also remains a war criminal, although never accused.

I don't have said he is or not a criminal. But It would have changed something if Wernher would had known about what was happen in M-D ?

 

[FADEC]

The problem is that he was an opportunist who stopped at nothing. He was boon and bane in one person. Accepting tens of thousands of deaths is a very big price for launching rockets into the sky.

 

[80mileshigh]

I think it's a testament to the moral and intellectual caliber of the members here that we are having this discussion at all. I bet other space fora might look at the anniversary less critically.

What makes the politics of Cold War spaceflight so interesting is its contradictions: genuine idealism built upon the imperatives of real politik ,and even murkier back-stories, that were anything but idealist. Von Braun was one big contradiction at the heart of it; we should always think of him critically with an eye to both sides of the contradiction.

 

[FADEC]

A nice documentary about von Braun:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUx-kHlPwco"]Wernher von Braun - Rocket Man for War and Peace - Part 3.3 - YouTube[/ame]

 

[this is an old account]

(removed)

 

[Ghostrider]

The Saturn V could easily have been turned into a terrible nuclear weapon- it could have been the most powerful weapon in all of human history! They could have called it the V3 and created a gigantic nuclear bomb into the payload!

Why? Bigger nukes don't make better nukes. The Tsar Bomba proved that. Do you need multiple safety redundancies, escape towers, restartable stages and all that jazz on a weapon system? And on top of that, a weapon system that takes days to be fueled, carried to the launch site and fired? By the time Saturn V was about, the Minuteman II was in service and that was a far more effective weapon. Saturn V has always been, and could only always be, a civilian launch vehicle.

Unless you wanted to land a commando of one on the Moon, that is. You know, one pilot and one soldier. With a Remington Nylon .22 rifle, most probably.