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We chose to go to the moon

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Starman, Jul 16, 2019.

  1. maumann

    maumann Well-Known Member

    Last edited: Jul 20, 2019
  2. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    About 5 minutes away from the first step on the livestreams.
     
  3. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    [​IMG]
     
    maumann and HanSenSE like this.
  4. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    Soviets initially picked the brains of captured German scientists for theoretical work, but nothing that got past the design stage. Pretty much everything done after 1955 was by Russian engineers and scientists. Sergey Korolev was no Nazi. :)
     
  5. heyabbott

    heyabbott Well-Known Member

    Operation Paperclip Operation Paperclip - Wikipedia

    Additionally
    One of the ironies of Hitler's desire for racial purity was that it drove out of continental Europe or into the camps many individuals who would have been extremely useful to the Axis war effort. Nowhere was this more evident than in the effort to produce an atomic bomb. A startling proportion of the most famous names on the project belonged to [Jewish ] scientists who came to England or America to flee from the Axis. The large number of refugees and immigrants working on the Manhattan Project gave the American nuclear program an international character unusual in such a top-secret program—and unique amongst the nuclear programs that followed in other countries—and helped give life in Los Alamos, NM during the war its unique character. Scientist Refugees and the Manhattan Project
     
    Last edited: Jul 21, 2019
  6. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Von Braun was in his early 20s and still a student when the Nazis took over. As he rose in authority the Nazis consolidated their power.

    By the time he got in a position to say anything about the policies of the government, for him to do so would have meant a quick trip to the firing squad himself.

    I don't think he had much active participation in slave labor or torture (unlike Rudolph), and obviously some inside the Nazi regime didn't think he was a true believer (indicated by his 1944 arrest), but he should have made a more definitive mea culpa toward the end of his life (after Apollo).

    He wasn't responsible, but he was certainly complicit. There were things he didn't know, but quite likely because he didn't want to know.
     
  7. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    Mort Sahl's line on Von Braun "his autobiography was entitled "I Aim at the Stars: But I Hit London"
     
    HanSenSE and heyabbott like this.
  8. Starman

    Starman Well-Known Member

    Which was picked up by Tom Lehrer of course.

    At the same time there were hundreds of thousands of American civilians who had worked on the B-24 and the B-29 and the Manhattan Project, whose only purpose had been to kill great numbers of people, but people weren't writing snarky songs about them.

    Von Braun was certainly not innocent, but he wasn't particularly more guilty than many others.
     
  9. And he wasn't alone.
    Dozens - more than a hundred Nazis - worked on the US Rocket project. And they weren't just foot soldiers who killed enemy combatants. They are fucking war criminals who actively participated in the roundup and slaughter of unarmed citizens, including the Jews.

    And Fuck Von Braun too.
    Our government should have used 'em all, squeezed 'em for all they were worth, then handed them to the Mossad.
    Instead they lived out fat and happy lives on the American dream.

    As Jack McCoy noted: Special Rules for Special Talents.
     
  10. heyabbott

    heyabbott Well-Known Member

    the great thing about the Internet is that it forces people to succinctly reduce and state large complex problems and issues with hundreds of variables into a single declarative sentence with all the confidence of a 3 year old demanding a cookie
     
  11. Regan MacNeil

    Regan MacNeil Well-Known Member

    For anyone interested, after years of not being available, From The Earth To The Moon is available on HBO.
     
    garrow likes this.
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