

The strange contagion of a dream - treeface
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2611/1

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idlewords
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.

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gjm11
> 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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio)).

