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Was America's Top Rocketeer a Communist Spy? The FBI Thought So
New submitter IMissAlexChilton (3748631) writes Frank Malina masterfully led the World War II effort to build U.S. rockets for jet-assisted takeoff and guided missiles. As described in IEEE Spectrum, Malina's motley crew of engineers and enthusiasts (including occultist Jack Parsons) founded the Jet Propulsion Lab and made critical breakthroughs in solid fuels, hypergolics, and high-altitude sounding rockets, laying the groundwork for NASA's future successes. And yet, under suspicion by the Feds at the war's end, Malina gave up his research career, and his team's efforts sank into obscurity. Taking his place: the former Nazi Wernher von Braun. Read "Frank Malina: America's Forgotten Rocketeer". Includes cool vintage footage of early JPL rocket tests.
Oh god here we go with the OTO, L. Ron Hubbard, and Aleister Crowley
A Nazi he was not.
Go read up on the history of Germany's rocket scientists. The majority were a buncha eggheads who thought it was cool they'd found someone willing to fund them, right up until they found themselves with guns pointed at their heads and explanations of what would happen to them or their families if they didn't succeed.
While it's s sad Frank Malina lost out on continued innovation in the JPL, put the blame where it belongs: The Feds and the Congresscritters who were so caught up in their witch hunts that they drove away the very brilliance that might've helped us not only take the space race to another level, but perhaps also avoid the stagnation imbued during the late saturn v and shuttle era.
Imagine if Skylab had stayed in orbit and been used as the basis of an ISS 20 years earlier.
The possibilities were endless. But as usual jackbooted thugs and politicos ruined them for their own careers.
I wonder how many innocent people today have had themselves and their careers ruined by the NSA/GCHQ/TLA and how as a result we have all suffered by not benefiting from their work.
Venona busted Alger Hiss but good.
Who cares?
From the government's standpoint, some very experienced Nazis were preferable to some oculists and scientologists. The Nazis could have merely joined the KKK back in the 50s, and pushed white America to the moon. On the other hand, scientologist super powers might have provided cheaper ways to LEO. Maybe we backed the wrong guys.
I think this is the intended artice:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aeros...
Frank Malina: America's Forgotten Rocketeer
von Braun didn't take anyone's place -- he created his own place in Huntsville. The work on rockets on the West Coast and other places in the US continued with little affect by von Braun. For example the Navy's Vanguard project which was supposed to launch the USA's first satellite was a parallel effort to the Army's efforts at Hunstville. And the Air Force developed the Atlas and Titan missiles in other parallel efforts. It just happened that when NASA needed big rockets for Apollo, the Saturn series developed by von Braun's team were the most suitable. Notably, precursors to Apollo, the manned orbital Mercury and Gemini missions, were launched on those Air Force derived boosters. The sentence in the summary is BS. And by all accounts, von Braun was agnostic towards the Nazis, neither a supporter nor a resister, disinterested in politics, but navigating the system he found himself by the time it was too late to get out -- yeah, I know it is more complicated than that, but I don't have a thesis to write here.
its just like any heirarchal system as people shuffle around and retire, Pompus manger X needs position Y, for buddy Z.
easiest way is to just make up crap / discredit / at which point you can put buddies where you want, its actually fun to watch
when you dont have to worry about societys shit in general.
See also Hsue-shen Tsien, another JPL founder, whose (unjustified) house arrest and deportation gave an immeasurable boost to China's missile program.
America prefered actual Nazis to suspected communists.
It's pretty hard to claim you're "agnostic" or "not a supporter" when you build weapons for someone.
You should look up who is China's "Father of Rockets".
Hint: just like Malina, except he was ethnic Chinese and decided to go to Communist China instead of giving up his career.
Suspecting your top talent of being a spy, what a great way to kickstart advancement programs for your enemies!
However remember the FBI was too incompetent back then to remember to bring handcuffs to the arrest of "public enemy number one". A necktie had to do the job.
And then they fell for the scam of the "lie detector" - or did they really fall for it or was Hoover just accepting yet another kickback before spending Government money?
What you see today is nothing like it was back then.
Good thing the government doesn't give a single shit about how much money it waste playing spooks.
The NSA thinks so!
| When you consider that it is cheaper for people to be killed instead of paying for surveillance
As overblown as the government surveillance has grown in America, the objective is still to ensure our safety (albeit at the expense of our freedom). Killing citizens would be a bit of a step back in the safety category.
And no--it wouldn't be cheaper.
| It has been common for the government to have public executions without trial when an american citizen is known to say "bad things"
Saddam Hussein did a little more than just saying "bad things"
Everyone knows we only have technology because of space. This heretical notion that somehow WWII drove the 20th century is not correct.
I invite the submitter to "self-criticism" DPRK-style.
Detractors can say what that want and they may be right about for some of it. But von Braun mostly behaved himself while he was here, we pumped him for all he was worth, and we got pretty good stuff. Yes, he designed stuff for our enemy, but if I had lived in the civil war times I might have built something like the CSS submarine Hunley. I would have been fighting for my country even though I may have had some doubts about it.
|| When you consider that it is cheaper for people to be killed instead of paying for surveillance
| As overblown as the government surveillance has grown in America, the objective is still to ensure our safety (albeit at the expense of our freedom). Killing citizens would be a bit of a step back in the safety category.
| And no--it wouldn't be cheaper.
Sure it is. No mess or fuss over the course of many years of a normal lifetime of roughly 70 years old. How could it not be cheaper?
|| It has been common for the government to have public executions without trial when an american citizen is known to say "bad things"
| Saddam Hussein did a little more than just saying "bad things"
Saddam Hussein just outlived his usefulness in the proxy war with the Soviets. The Iraq War on a lack of intelligence helped the economy have an easier time surviving the dot com bust (not Desert Storm but instead the efforts to kill him in 2003). There are many other "naughty" leaders in the world, but some dictators are installed by the US while others are ignored because they help to facilitate commerce (they just haven't gotten on the wrong side of US interests yet). It is a distraction to bring him up, focus on US citizen executions, that is what this is about. Otherwise you just look like a troll.
It has been common for the government to have public executions without trial when an american citizen is known to say "bad things"
Saddam Hussein did a little more than just saying "bad things"
I wasn't aware that he was an american citizen.
Plus we didn't off him when he was murdering Kurds and other "undesirables", or when he started a revanchist war against Iran that resulted in several hundred thousand, possibly a million, casualties. He only got in the doghouse for seizing Kuwait, threatening the carefully engineered balance-of-powerlessness established in the middle east by the the allies after WWI.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Malina is pretty well known in some corners of CS for his work on kinetic sculpture and generative art, and for founding the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, along with its associated journal Leonardo . But I didn't know he did rockets earlier in his career.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
65 posts without an xkcd link? WTF.
I'm so sick of Denialists who refuse to except the facts about Communism and the evil it created for hundreds of millions of people.and the threat that it posed to those not yet taken by it.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Ah yes, like that dangerous playwright who was offered a way out if his wife, Marilyn Monroe, agreed to be photographed with McCarthy for political promotional material. That was one part of the witch hunt, in that case more accurately called a shakedown.
It was an utterly worthless grab at power by an immoral, corrupt and ultimately cowardly man who wanted to skew the political playing field in his direction when opposed by a large number of far more worthy candidates for President from both parties. It's just as well that he bit off more than he could chew by getting a lot of special favors for one of his friends in the military and then attempting to prove that General Marshall (of the Marshall plan and a lot of other things, such as running a big chunk of WWII) was a communist. His stupid stunt meant to send him into the White House was exposed for what it was - a power grab by a man who had achieved very little in his life attempting to drag down others who had and make himself look bigger.
So do you think he had a list of spies like he said he did? Why didn't he hand them over then? Wouldn't it be a bit like treason to have a list of foreign spies and not hand it over to law enforcement?
I wonder how many innocent people had themselves and their careers ruined by Communists. I seen numbers over 100 million just for people murdered by Communists.
Don't forget that Stalin was originally Hitler's ally. They conspired together to invade Poland, splitting the country between the two of them. So Stalin's Soviet Union was partly responsible for the start of the war. It was only Hitler's later betrayal and invasion of the Soviet Union that ended the alliance with Hitler and prompted a new alliance with the US and the UK.
You clearly have not read the appropriate NASA documents.
Skylab was in very good condition and NASA wanted to use it in conjunction with the shuttle, which was scheduled to be operational before Skylab fell into the atmosphere. The Shuttle was to be used to re-boost it, but two things happened: [1] solar activity was higher than expected (which affects the upper-most part of the atmosphere and increased the atmospheric drag on Skylab) and [2] the shuttle ended-up being too far behind schedule. NASA, realizing that shuttles would not be ready in time, studied launching an unmanned "tug" to dock with and re-boost Skylab so it would still be there on orbit and operational by the time shuttles were ready, but congress in the late 70's was as stupid as today - Congress did not fund this cheap solution, so we ended-up dumping $100 Billion and ten years of construction time into building ISS to get a similar orbital capability (Skylab had 320 cubic meters pressurized volume, that's more than the US part of the ISS). The shuttle could have then flown additions to Skylab (which had a docking adapter for multiple visiting vehicles). An enhanced Skylab would have had no Russian "entanglements", and had its own lifesupport and navigation capabilities.
Skylab was FAR from "worn out" and the damage from the launch was quite managable. The astronauts who closed it out left it ready for re-manning. When Skylab re-entered the atmosphere it did so under remote control from the ground, with its systems fully functioning until they were destroyed by the reentry. READ THE DAMNED REPORTS, which consist of hundreds of paged of excellent details, before misinforming people.
Best expressed by no one else than Harry S Truman, who, when a member of the congress complained about the huge amounts of former Nazis in the new intelligence agency the US was building up in post-war Germany (nowadays known as BND), simply replied: "I don't care if this Gehlen guy [first head of the agency, a former Nazi-general] is fucking goats - as long as he's helping us, we'll use him".
During the 2nd world-war, if you played your cards well in Germany, you could achieve a lot. Some people early on realized this and built a career on it that often continued after the war. If you had the support of "the system", you had almost unlimited resources at your disposal.
Von Braun used these resources because he had a vision, a dream - and he was crazy and ruthless enough to sacrifice anything to make his dream come true.
Like the above mentioned Gehlen, he was also bold enough to change sides when the right time had come - knowing that the work he had done and the ideas in his head were more interesting to the Allies than the rest of what had happened during the war.
People from the UK (where V2 rockets hit mostly) are usually furious when you mention the name - they'd have probably wanted to put him up for trial in Nuremberg and seen him hanging - but his work, his men and he himself were already too important by the time the court was setup - and the cold-war had already started.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
You communist-apologists are just incredible.... every time somebody points out even a subset of the evils and the failures of communism, you guys always say "the wrong guys tried it!" or "they did not do it right!" or "that wasn't communism... that was something ELSE and not the ideal form!". Stalin was "the wrong guy", Lenin "did it wrong", chairman Mao "didn't do it right", Pol Pot "didn't really try it", Nicolae Ceausescu "was the wrong guy AND did not really try it" etc etc etc.
NEWSFLASH: There is no RIGHT way to do evil. The primary problem with Communism is that the only way to implement it is by evil means (by stealing from people and abusing people and forcing people to act contrary to their individual rights) ... and the ONLY way to do that is by selecting evil men and giving them the power... but such men ALWAYS use the power they are given for evil.
You need to take "Human Nature 101" or, failing that, try putting down your tablet (with the facebook page and twitter feeds) and try READING some serious BOOKS - the sort that use big words and make you THINK. Hayek's "The Road to Surfdom" is an excellent starting point.
Sadly, most societies in human history have used slave labor at some point; historically, it's been "the norm" far more often than the freedoms we all have today. It took rare and extraordinary men (like William Wilberforce, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln) to gradually re-adjust the thinking of human beings to see slavery as "wrong" and "unjust".
I'm not in any way inclined to defend the WWII Germans (not all were members of the NAZI party) given the number of relatives I had who fought againsts them in WWII and my ardent opposition to national socialism, BUT whose who try to tar Von Braun with the charge of using "slave labor" need to answer two questions: [1] just how much proof do they have that he either CHOSE to use slaves (NOT ideal aerospace workers) or had any say in their treatment? and [2] given that the vast majority of young german men were conscripted and in combat facing very life-threatening situations themselves, how bad should the average german have felt about "prisoners" being forced to work in factories that (as dangerous as they indeed were) would still have seemed preferable to many combat duties? I am NOT saying that the slave laborers had it "good" or "easy" or "safe" ... just saying that the average German AT THAT TIME AND PLACE would have thought about their sons, brothers, fathers, etc on the war fronts and from that perspective would have had a very different view of the conditions of the "prisoners" (who they would have been inclined to believe had "done SOMETHING wrong" just as civilians in all nations tend to assume people in their prisons are guilty of something) Even the least-evil German authority who (IF given any choice) did NOT use slave labor (given the immense numbers of people Hitler and the SS were locking-up) probably would have thought of themselves in a dilemma similar to the One Truman faced with the atomic bomb: "If I do NOT use it and then after the war the relatives of all the soldiers who died because of my choice find out then what will I say?". AGAIN: Slave labor is evil and the WWII German version was BRUTAL, but it's easy to sit at a keyboard in the relative comfort of mommy's basement and pontificate on the imperfections of man, having first stripped-away all context and wiped-away all the bloodshed surrounding it. Slavery in the American South was a far more monstrous thing in that the Southern Slave owners were not even using "enemiy prisoners" in time of all-out total war... the US slave "owners" simply were enriching themselves financially.
Remember: Von Braun was, at one time, jailed by the NAZIs who apparently thought he was sabotaging his work... it's entirely probable that he had absolutely no say in the workforce he was ordered to use. There is probably no way to prove this either way, and Von Braun took to his grave his honest personal thoughts about all this. Anything he (or indeed any of his associates) said or wrote about it in his post-war years must be presumed to be "tainted" (if he claimed to not know, we can assume he would not have admitted it even if he'd known, and if he said he knew but was sorry we sould presume this was a self-serving attempt at redemption). There is simply no way anybody associated with anything the entire world has judged "exterme evil" can ever be fully redeemed in the eyes of all.
Is it not possible to be a Communist - even in America - without automatically being a spy or traitor? In most of the world 'communist' means 'somebody whose political views align with Communism'; well, more or less. If it is possible to be Christian, Jew, Muslim, ... and still be a patriotic American, is it not possible to be a Communist, patriotic American? Or course it is.
'Communism' is, put simply, the idea that means of production should not be owned by any individual, but should belong to the community. Not the state - the community, whatever that means. Equating the state with the community is a highly artificial idea. Please note that communism in this sense does not mean that people can't have property, it just means that the means of production are owned by everybody - like in a cooperative, really. Or a family - and if anything is being touted as American these days, it is 'family values'; so communism is at the core of what it means to be American.
Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016
And an almost fanatical devotion to physics.
No brain, no pain.
"Buy a shotgun!"
Supports gay marriage. Showed up the prez as being a political weasel on the issue.