The problem with getting off this earth is the people who are good at conquering other people through politics and emotions.
Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered).
The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands.
The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket.
It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding.
So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history.
All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress.
So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster.
The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well.
It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings.
There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.
I mostly agree. I used to buy into the narrative of human progress over the course of 10,000 years of civilization. Now I see human knowledge/achievement much more as an ebb and flow with some momentum retained across time and societies. I see our current state of progress as a kind of happy accident. Some combination of Secularism, Legalism, Bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Socialsim and Education has created the imperfect but better world (mostly better for humans) we inhabit today. Which means to me that none of us really know what's created this progress and we can't be entirely sure what has arrested it at times. There isn't an arrow of human progress but a churning jumble that right now has come out with a relative lull in human suffering and a corresponding bump in personal convenience.
The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.
I really think the lesson is one of competition. Without it, we'd never have the V2, and even if we did have the V2 we would still never have had the Saturn rockets. The Russians would never have developed the RD-180, and so SpaceX and BO would never exist.
His past patriotic allegiance to Nazi Germany is a difficult stain on his legacy that can blind one to his technological achievements.
However, during the end of WWII he intentionally surrendered himself, his team and capital into our hands -- the Americans. He came to America, assimilated and oversaw the greatest engineering feat in history when we were losing the space race to Russia, and would have continued to lose without him.
I would also consider, what should he or could he have done in his time? OK, how about what have I or you done to stop the genocide in Darfur? Nobody in the Western world did much, and we didn't do anything at all about the Cambodian genocide. The American Government has also never officially acknowledged the Native American genocide, or paid reparations for it--these would be crimes in Germany today.
In my mind it is important to address these moral questions, which are indeed difficult, but if we are not honest about them then we find can at times be the pot calling the kettle black.
Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered). The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands. The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket. It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding. So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history. All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress. So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster.
The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well.
It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings.
There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.