Slashdot Mirror
Man Conquers Space
dirtyhank writes "Half a century ago space exploration was the ultimate adventure and a team headed by Wernher von Braun dreamed about it for Colliers Magazine. Their vision of the future to come was too optimistic though and we haven't made to Mars yet. Now the dreamers are some people in Australia trying to produce Man Conquers Space, a documentary based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950's in Colliers actually came to pass - and sooner than they expected."
"Man wants bigger welfare check, retreats from space"
What, all of it?
Came up on aldaily.com a couple days ago:s pacear t.shtml
http://www.americanheritage.com/it/2002/01/
Isn't that what Star Trek, Red Dwarf, and Star Wars is for?
Too many zeros, not enough ones
...and unfortunantely we will not be venturing into space until it is commercially viable to do so.
There's a whole slew of phrases like 'when in rome, do as the romans do' or 'the best way to change a system is from the inside'
I'm afraid we're just going to have to accept this fact (that space exploration won't get another kick 'til it makes people money), and work towards making new propulsion systems, more efficient systems, etc. until we get to this point, then hopefully awareness will increase and people will get excited about space exploration for the sake of space exploration again (after it has blown up again for the sake of money).
Of course, a miracle (or a disaster) could cause this to go another way
Call me a pessimist, or even a defeatist, but this is how I see things.
Kind of like when a bacterial culture gets week strains weeded out in a tough time, maybe this can be good... if it doesn't kill everything.
A good old fashioned barn raising...
I mean server raising...
Or is that razeing...
Heck with it, let the slashdotting commence!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"Their vision of the future to come was too optimistic though and we haven't made to Mars yet"
We haven't 'made it' to Mars yet because dopey website editors aren't in charge of space policy - thankfully.
Should Wernher von Braun be honored like this? I think he was an opportunist, he new what his work was used for by the Germans during WWII.
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
quoting the Tom Lehrer tune as found at http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/vonbraun. htm
Wernher von Braun:
And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
naah sig schmig
Star Trek, Red Dward, and Star Wars is nothing but opera. Only the most pessimistic of people can even begin to tender the idea you just did. The people over in Australia are not about story telling, they're about realization.
People may not realize it, but over the course of the past 50 years; we have accomplished what science fiction novels merely speculated about not as far back ago as the 1970's.
Being only 16, I'm not as knowledgable about it as you elder slashdotters; but American and Russian accomplishments in space are more monumental than we realize. Being a firm believer in the theory that we actually did put a man on the moon; I am one to pay attention at the tremendous problems and obstacles that the folks at NASA and the Russian Cosmonauts ran into.
These people are doing the same, but in a more intricate and viable manner. One that teaches others exactly what we are and have been capable of, as long as we put our heads together. One could argue that the step from putting a dog in space and a man on the moon is one so tremendous it makes the evolution of the internet look like nothing more than a grade school game of "Telephone."
Keep that in mind before you toss aside these people's efforts as nothing more than a redundancy.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
55:55:20 (9:07 PM CT) - Swigert: "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."
Which is slightly different. You can read the transcript here.
I didn't realize Pinky and The Brain were aussies, from the accent I thought they were something european.
Man Conquers Space
yeah...
Kinda like how I conquered the mighty oceans last week when I went for a little paddle in the surf.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
... I thought the moon landing was faked! Now we're going to go to Mars?! Why do you people keep rocking my world?!?!!? ;)
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
Bugger off, cockmonger. This story kicks ass.
Go there, those girls are so hot I shit myself!!
1: Write free software
2: ?
3: Conquer space.
4: Profit!
yum
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...
...
/library/.mc/ids.by.cats /catalog/office/.mc/search.results /library/drmath/results.html /library/autohandler
/var/lib/mason/obj/library/.mc/ids.by.cats:103 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/HTML/Mason/Commands .pm:70 /var/lib/mason/obj/catalog/office/.mc/search.resul ts:252 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/HTML/Mason/Commands .pm:70 /var/lib/mason/obj/library/drmath/results.html:288 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/HTML/Mason/Commands .pm:64 /var/lib/mason/obj/library/autohandler:30 /var/lib/mason/obj/library/autohandler:14
______________funny paste, after trying to lookup 51.4....
Mason error
error in file:
line 103:
Can't call method "fetch" without a package or object reference
context:
99:
my %union = ();
100:
my %isect = ();
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my $ncats = 0;
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do {
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while ($sth->fetch) {
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#
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# the union is ids in any tree, the intersection is ids in all trees
106:
#
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if ($union{$vals->{$options{'column'}}}++) { $isect{$vals->{$options{'column'}}}++ };
component stack:
code stack:
debug info:
Debug file is '/var/lib/mason/debug/anon/4'.
There are some other interesting Mars mission links. There is a planned British mission here. The 2001 odyssey mission to mars is here. And info about the NASA missions here..
Oh, yes. One of my favorite documentaries is by Steven Spielberg and is based on the premise that an alien was stranded on earth and befriended a human boy to help him get back home. Man, that documentary footage of those flying bikes is still vivid in my head.
The final frontier. Consider how big our own galaxy is, and imagine a beowolf cluster of 'em, how long it would take to explore it let alone conquer it?
Too many zeros, not enough ones
Is there a Space Exploration equivalent of Moore's Law? If not, I hereby claim one, and call it "Hugesmile's Law". Something to the effect of: Every decade, Man will extend its reach into outerspace by a factor of 100. (ok, I still need to work out the details, but I bet if you examined the Eurpoean exploration of the earth over the past millennium, you could come up with an earth-bound equivalent.)
You can look at it, you like it, you wish you have it, but you never really get it.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
By the time all the hardware technology becomes available, the whole space of software - languages, algorithms, protocols, data structures etc - will be completely patented and owned by warring corporate interests.
The royalties on all the software patents will exceed, by orders of magnitude, the costs of hardware, training, admin etc. NASA will never be able to afford it.
Worse, if NASA just goes ahead and codes like they did in the '50s and '60s. Imagine sitting in the spacecraft, just entering the red planet's atmosphere, and hearing on the radio:
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I realize it's harmless, but ManConquersSpaceEnter.html is abbreviated MCSEnter, and the MCSE doesn't get past the firewall here.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find the headline "Man conquers space" ironic coupled with the news of a half-mile-wide asteroid nearly missing Earth?
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
...but sometimes I hit London.
It is dismaying that so many posters here, and also in response to similar stories, criticize and deny the need for space travel (it is as natural and necessary as humanity's migration from th Great Rift Valley). Their imaginations and aspirations seem bounded by the limits on their credit cards.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Re-read Asimov's "The Caves of Steel" to get the
answer why space exploration stopped.
What we (I mean the world economy) need from
space technologies - GPS, InMarSat, Satellite TV.
It is almost all. For town-centric civilisation
it is cheaper to build cellular phone base-station
in every town and connect every TVset with broadcast-station via cable, than launch projects
like Iridium, which uses satellite technology.
If world population would spread more evenly (and welfare would spread more evenly among it) various space-based communication systems like Iridium
would be more viable.
Then they would bring hundreds of launches per year just for maintainance, and these hundreds of
launches would become cheap enough to make orbital production of certain materials (say semiconductor cristalls) commercially viable.
Then and only then space technologies would become cheap enough to allow individuals or private companies to think about interplatnetary flight.
Communication sattelittes are already part of world economy. I don't know how it is in America, but in Russia, where space technology is one of few high-technologies we can trade out, various sattelite projects are often mentioned on the first pages of financial newspapers.
How can you have a documentary that documents something that didn't happen? I've already read and seen this. It's called "science fiction". It's not new. Can you explain what makes this piece of science fiction more worthy of interest than any other?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
When the first V-2 hit London von Braun remarked to his colleagues, "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
There's the space up there,
the space down there,
and the space between your ears!
To see the illustrations made me kind of nostalgic, which is a bit strange considering I was born in 1977. However, when I was younger, I used to read this cartoon "Allan Kämpe" which had a very 50's feeling over it. So the style is very similar between that old cartoon and these images in the article. Unfortunately, I haven't found much info on Allan Kämpe, but here are two pages:
Link1
Link2
It is dismaying that so many posters here, and also in response to similar stories, criticize and deny the need for space travel (it is as natural and necessary as humanity's migration from th Great Rift Valley). Their imaginations and aspirations seem bounded by the limits on their credit cards.
Well said.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A funny quote from von Braun:
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
And one that's less than funny:
I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London.
Unless von Braun was sarcastically mocking Oscar Wilde's comment:
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
As usual, hardly anyone bothers to read the cited article. The film makers don't call it a "documentary".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Slashdot has proved to be an excellent resource for links to the Buran's design. Thanks slashdotters!
Well, I have this question about the American shuttle's design compromises. I have heard that political pressure from the USAF, and the military-industrial complex, resulted in a larger shuttle, capable of carrying larger, military payloads. I read that a smaller shuttle would have been cheaper to build and run.
True?
Safety? The Burans had four ejection seats.
The Buran could have carried five times the payload of the American shuttle.
We couldn't even go back to the moon again today because we have lost that knowledge base. Sure it was recorded, but the engineers that wrote it down have retired or died. There is a knowledge and experience gap with the following generation of engineers after the Apollo program who never had the opportunity to work under the masters because we stopped the big adventure and chose to stay in earth orbit.
The DoD will build a new fighter aircraft every 10 to 15 years whether they need one or not just so the next generation of engineers will know how to do it. It doesn't matter if it actually ever results in a procurement. The design process itself serves the purpose of training our engineers and keeping us technologically viable in that arena.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
"The Moon of Earth." Narrator: The moon. For several years, she has fascinated many. But will man ever walk on her fertile surface? [cut to a shot of Adlai Stevenson at some sort of press conference] Democratic hopeful Adlai Stevenson says so. Stevenson: I have no objection to man walking on the moon. [photographers snap several pictures] [cut back to the moon where a family plays on the moon's fertile surface] Narrator: By 1964, experts say man will have established twelve colonies on the moon, ideal for family vacations. [a man fishes a comely moon maiden out of a crater.She winks at the audience] [a chart shows the difference] Once there, you'll weigh only a small percentage of what you weigh on Earth. [cut to a shot of a chubby boy eating pie] Slow down, tubby! You're not on the moon yet! [cut to a shot of the moon, with an American flag superimposed on it. The camera pulls back to reveal some men in spacesuits] The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them? [fini. The film runs off the reel] Ralph: Miss Hoover, the movie's over. Lisa: Where's Miss Hoover? Janey: [looks out the window] Hey, her car's gone. Ralph: Maybe she drove to the moon.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Come on now peoples, get it together! Where's the obligatory Simpsons quote relating to the time when Homer posed as a reporter for Colliers magazine so that Mr. B could be in that months Star Snoop? Then as Burns was being hauled off by the FBI/IRS? he shouts to Homer to let the people of Colliers Magazine know of his injustice???
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
Can I use that as a sig? Thanks!
Mr P understands gravity. Yes, gravity sweeps a lot meteors to strike the Earth all the time. If I was a grammar nazi I would argue over the dividing line between a small asteroid and large meteor. Life is too short for that however.
Instead I will give you some friendly advice.
Mr P, you understand gravity perfectly. But Mr P, it is not enough to understand gravity. Sometimes you must understand the opposite of gravity -- comedy!
The use of lots of exclamation points should have been your first clue.
first they will conquer sci-fi with Farscape, then maybe they can move onto space - the Aussies, that is.
Of course, that's 'mock' in the sense of 'imitation,' not in the sense of 'to ridicule'! Heh heh...
"My name is Mok, thanks a lot."
(you think he's joking, but he's not)
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Conquered space? Man hasn't conquered 5h1t. The current reliance on remote controls for anything out of LEO (low Earth orbit) means that we are completely at the mercy of accidents and unforeseen events. The list of those is long; the latest accident occurred only a few days ago and cost us a comet probe. Bye-bye to several hundred million dollars.
... no longer just the Third World, but those Asiatic societies that we have stuck up our noses at for the last 2 generations.
Even though India really needs clean water and reliable power, they may yet -- perhaps in partnership with China -- put Mankind In Space for real and permanently.
They are not overburdened with concern for Human life to the point that they are entirely risk averse.
Strangely, as individuals enough Americans DO accept risk.
There are many who would throw down their XBox controllers and run at top speed to sign up for the next launch of the riskiest launch mechanism, yet the prevailing morass of institutional controls just ensure that politicians, administrators, unionists, and even lawyers and accountants dictate how space missions are organized.
This is all done instead of putting the Right Stuff in charge; even Goldin was a bad bet, he being much more Administrator than Astronaut.
And this is all at the cost of lacking not only general vision, but also economic vision. A manned space program will cost more money to startup, but will save money in the long run since the most flexible robots will always be on the scene: humans. When something breaks, skilled people with tools, equipment, parts and materials can show up and fix the goddamn problem.
Nearly the only voice calling for this is my own, as I have never seen any such sentiment in news media, and in Internet fora only with rarity. (Latinize "forums" == sound snooty) The overwhelming sentiments in news media (which infect Internet fora like the stink of the Matrix did to the Agent) are for unmanned space exploration. "Manned missions cost too much"they constantly whine, while we lose probe after probe to the sloppiest engineering this side of your first birdhouse. O'Neill is spinning in his grave (incidentally creating artificial gravity within his innards), and Sagan's death relieved Mr. Biiiillllions of the sheer embarrassment, from this travesty we call a technological civilization.
Myself, I'm betting on the Other World
Where have the heroes gone? Even stripping away the mythical wrappings, there were still men and women (i.e. those women who were allowed to make a difference) who would boldly go. The actual conquering of space is just the right thing to do, since (1) It's Empty: there are no natives to murder and displace; (2) It's Profitable: the return on sensible investment can be enormous; and (3) It's Necessary: as civilization keeps expanding, the mix of resources and environment of the planet will overload -- it must seek energy and materials from Sol and the Belt.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
The French never made good on the early start provided to them by Yves Klein, first man in space.
A recent American Heritage of Invention & Technology article, To Boldly Paint What No Man Has Painted Before is a fascinating read about Chester Bonestell, the painter who, among other things, illustrated the Collier space-flight series and collaborated with Wernher von Braun on the US space program. His realistic, scientifically-founded paintings apparently were a huge inspiration to scientists and sci-fi writers alike.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Another documentry from Australia:
Geeks Conquer Females, a documentary based on the premise that all that we dreamt of as adolescents actually came to pass - and sooner than we expected.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
;)
This sentence is random filler to get past slashdot's random filter.
- undoware.ca
I remember when I was a child I was taught in school that von Braun was a great scientist and an admirable man. I repeated this in front of my father (who had met and worked with the man) and his face turned hard as he told me, "Von Braun is a Nazi. He was always a Nazi, and he's been rewarded for being a Nazi, and he'll always be a Nazi."
Since then I've read stories from slave-labor survivors about the atrocities at Thuringen and Peenemunde. It appears that my father's judgement was sound; von Braun was a cold-hearted slave-driver at the very least - and if the most extreme of the stories that eyewitnesses have told are true, then he was a sadistic monster.
If we are to honor von Braun for his contributions to science, we should equally decry his history of racism, slave labor exploitation, and possibly torture. At the very least our government should stop trying to cover it up, and NASA's biography of the man should include the testimony of the workers at Peenemunde.
I can't help but get peeved every time I see a title like "Man Conquers Space." I am glad that everyone is making fun of it, but I worry about the people that take it seriously. The "conquer" part is just stupid, but the "man" part can be insidious. Many people, when seeing the title just replace "man" with "humanity" and "people" and just don't worry about it. The trick is since we have words that encompass both genders, why don't we use them instead? That way there is never a chance for confusion. I am fully aware that the Apollo mission was male dominated and that, if history had progressed as it did in this movie, the Mars program would have been entirely male, too. I just look forward to a future where we can have nice titles like "Humanity's Exploration of Space," and I can get all worked up about something else. Aside from my soap box, I thought those of you interested in exploration of space might want to check out the Space Generation Foundation's hompeage: http://www.spacegen.org/ These are the people responsible for planning Yuri's Night and other neat space events.
Sure. Have at it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Apollo was scrapped just as the technology to get to the moon had been proven. It should have been the prelude to a moon base; instead it ended up being a once-only.
A moon base could have been set up along the lines of bases in Antarctica as a scientific research station. Quite apart from producing an immense source of knowledge about our nearest neighbour, astronomy could have been conducted without an atmosphere in the way, mining and ultimately spacecraft assembly on the moon studied and experience gained in long-duration space habitation which could be applied to a future Mars colony. All within a couple of days distance from earth.
It wouldn't have needed a Shuttle or even a space station; a series of flights by uprated Saturn V's would have done nicely.
Wouldn't it be easier just to rent "2001:..." on DVD?
(* W von B isn't that notorious as a Nazi villain with her generation because his rockets came so late in the war.... *)
Hitler was known to spend lots, perhaps too much, on high-tech gadgetry. His final tank was an expensive Edsel because he kept trying to top the prior one with size and power and went overboard.
If the war went on longer, then a lot of these "toys" may have been much more dangerous if perfected.
Perhaps von-B actually *saved* lives by making them spend effort on rockets rather than something with a sooner "payoff".
If you did the war accounting, I bet rockets were not a good expenditure in hindsite.
Table-ized A.I.
No, you live in a money-centered United States of America. Just because the U.S. is content to stagnate here on earth doesn't mean that others are.
Tell that to Tony Blair--America's favorite sock puppet!
OK, Mod as Troll or Flamebait if you want, but this is how I honestly feel, and considering the points I'm going to make (although rather harshly), I feel it is entirely valid.
<rant>
#1: You're Offtopic(-1) until the last line, lucky for you, but please link when speakng of URLs. It makes life easier for us, and it makes you look smarter and more professional, even if it is just a simple thing.
Maybe you should get your mind out of the gutter. "Man" in this context is not in refferal to "Men only", but to "mankind" or "humanity". Your so worried about wether a word has testicles involved or not you're missing other important things in our world you should worry about, like Palladium, or the DMCA. Or civil liberties? OR slave labor, starvation, or genocide in 3rd world countries?? Instead, you act as if use of words is a conspiracy to keep women on the babymaker leash, and this is the problem with the world today. OKAY, right, i'm sure that "keeping my bitch in the kitchen" was the first thing on these people's mind when naming a fictional movie about space exploration.
Might I also point out that this movie is supposed to be a direct reflection of the time period it represents, at which time no one would give a flying fuck about a name like "Man Conquers Space". In fact I'd be suprised to see a documentary style film from the sixties or earlier called something as lifelessly PC as "Humankind educates and nourishes their skill and creativity, allowing for the graceful exploratrion of Space". Ironically enough, this sounds just like a passive little housewife...hmm i thought the whole point was to get away from that?
When will all these PC retards realize that they are the only truly offensive people? The rest of us really don't care that much, and I think if the world would lighten up a bit we'd get along better and get alot more accomplished, instead of constantly worrying that we might "offend someone" because they "dont' liek what we have to say"...hey, isn't that called censorship?
</rant>
Ok now that my blunt point has been made, I'll be a bit nicer by saying this: See how worked up I get when people get worked up about things like that? This just goes aroudn and around, so why even worry? No one is going to think "Women can't explore space" due to such a title. Anyone who does is either undereducated or intoxicated, both of which are unrelated problems.
:-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
It's a FICTIONAL WORK.
Christ.
Otherwise good points, I think we shoudl get up there too. I know I'd love to go....
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
LMAO.
Ahh, MrP, you make my day again and again.
I have been a blake fan for quite some time now, BTW. Funny as hell!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
That was my dream, to walk the Red Planet.
We were told this as children, that we would travel space, the legacy for those of us who were born on the year men first walked the Moon. We watched reruns of Star Trek and marveled at the possibilities.
We dreamed.
Instead, we have the truth of a fucked up world were the Welfare State is the reality, and War is the only truth.
Help me dream again...
I've read Space by James A. Michener. It begins during World War II in Germany just before the fall of Hitler and goes onward to the present. It follows the German scientists as the travel to America, the forming of NASA, the Apollo program, and more. It was my first Michener book I had ever read at the time and I loved it. I've read Alaska and Hawaii since then and I plan to read more of his historical fiction novels.
I am going to repeat my main point. Von Braun was prepared to risk his life to make a point. And the point he risked it to make was that he thought the Nazis were wasting money, not that they were wasting lives.
You suggest that most senior Nazis weren't stupid? Did you check out the link to the brief biography of Rudolph Hess? Clearly nutty as a fruit-cake.
Jacob Bronowski describes how one of the senior Nazis, Goebbels or Himmler IIRC, wanted to take Heisenberg away from atomic research to try to prove, once and for all, that the stars are made of ice.
Look at the German research into atomic weapons. It was a complete failure, but no one was shot, or thrown in prison. In his book "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman" Richard Feynman describes how he supervised a team of young Army enlisted guys, who were chosen right out of basic training because they had scientific ability. These guys were human calculators, and ran punched cards through big mechanical calculators, to perform the very labourious calculations necessary to determine the amount of Fissile material needed to make a bomb. Heisenberg's group did the same calculation, but their answer was wildly off. They thought a bomb would require hundreds of kilograms of U235, not a kilogram or two.
The suggestion has been made that Heisenberg, or someone in his group, purposely fouled up the calculation.
If Leo Szilard hadn't escaped from Germany one step ahead of the Nazis do you think that he would have refused to work on German weapons research? Szilard circulated petition to Truman among the other scientists pleading with him forgo dropping the bomb on a Japanese city before it had been demonstrated to the Japanese high command.
Szilard gave up Physics after the war. He wrote some science fiction. This collection includes the short story "My Trial as a War Criminal", which I will strongly recommend...
You know, regardless of how the real world happens to be in regard to actual space travel, I think NASA's optimist's conquest of space film would make a cool basis for a story series.
.
If written well and produced well, it would be fun!
Especially the part where greed, human stupidity and war-mongering don't get in the way of progress and exploration.
I guess that's where ol' Gene R. came from. .
-Fantastic Lad
excused his nazi past, blowing it off like
most scientists blow off their responsibility.
Let me see if I have this right. Von Braun was a card carrying Nazi wasn't he? We are not talking about an innocent civilian. We have a guy, who is head of weapons development programs that caused thousands of deaths, correct? Or possibly tens of thousands, as one of the other contributors to this thread said that many slave labourers were worked to death. We have this weapons developer, and you defend him because he might have been afraid to quit?
You really should read Szilard's "My trial as a War Criminal". It is set in 1949. The Soviets conquer America in a sneak germ warfare attack. President Truman, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of State Byrnes are to stand trial for their decision to drop the bomb. Szilard stands trial for his role in the development of the bomb. (After the Soviets offer him the same deal the Americans offered von Braun -- charges dropped if he moved to the Soviet Union, and worked on their weapons programs.)
Szilard is, I believe, correct to believe he and Truman would have stood trial under those circumstances. Truman is convicted of violating the 'customs of war', because prior to Hiroshima, it wasn't 'customary' to drop atomic bombs on cities.
And my interpretation would be that Szilard thought the Nuremberg trials were about vengeance, not justice. Germany and Yugoslavia had laws, which presumably included laws against kidnapping, rape, murder. Should those who ordered or committed kidnapping, rape or murder stand trial under the laws of their own nation? Or the nation where the crimes were committed?
If the reasons we didn't trust the Germans, Japanese to conduct trials for the crimes committed on their territory is that we don't trust it will result in a satisfactory verdict or sentence, then were the trials about justice, or vengeance?
If the war trials were truly just then Allied soldiers who committed war crimes should also have stood trial. Saving Private Ryan portrayed Americans shooting prisoners who had already surrendered. That is a war crime. I know these kinds of incidents happened -- maybe not on Omaha beach, but they did happen.
Are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't have stood trial in Germany because his role was ambiguous? Isn't that what a trial is for? Or are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't be punished because some other criminals slipped away unpunished? Mr or Ms Anonymous Coward, I have had occasions in my life where I have had my courage tested. I witnessed what appeared to be Police Brutality from my office window some time ago. I reported it to the Police Complaints Commision. Which resulted in having the investigator lean on me, and try to intimidate me. He made clear that before he investigated his fellow officers he was going to investigate me. In spite of this pressure I was dogged in my pursuit of the truth. I stuck to my principles. It took five months to learn what had really happened. Yes, frankly, it was frightening.No, this test wasn't nearly as challenging as those I believe von Braun should have faced. But then I didn't choose to manage a huge weapons development program.
I find it a bit ironic that you should question my courage, when you choose to post as an "anonymous coward".
About von Braun's status as a Nazi party member -- I was told this by a buddy of mine, who was a big fan of space exploration. He had read a biography of VB, and explained he wasn't really a Nazi. He just wanted to make rockets. He told me VB joined the Nazi party just because he thought it would make it easier for him to use his political pull to enable him to build rockets. My buddies interpretation was that VB was taking advantage of the Nazis.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
Faith without works is dead.
If you still want to go to space, start a business (or look me up after I've actually gone to college, gotten a few degrees, and started a space enterprise of my own) and get yourself there. Waiting for somebody else to make it happen is asking for failure and shattered dreams. At least this way, when your dreams are shattered, nobody can say you didn't try...