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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.
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.
I think this is the intended artice:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aeros...
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.
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.
Iris Chang's Thread of the Silkworm has an excellent account of Tsien.
Nazi Germany was gone, but Communist Soviet was very much alive and kicking. Loyalty to Nazi Germany would have been irrelevant.
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
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?
Where did it say he was a scientologist? They didn't even exist back them. You made that up to pump up your argument.
Jack Parsons was friends with L. Ron Hubbard for a time, and this friendship allegedly failed because Hubbard took off with a great deal of Parsons' money. Again allegedly, Scientology was founded with that money. Malina and Parsons are two major figures in rocketry who did various occult rituals with both Alastair Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard and basically the historical links between those last two are mostly links through the rocket researchers more than direct contacts.
Who is John Cabal?
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
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.
Occultist? You're scared he's going to spill state secrets to Satan? .
Not occultist, OP said oculist. You know, a 17th-century optometrist.
And an almost fanatical devotion to physics.
No brain, no pain.
Let's look at the diplomatic history. Stalin was against the Nazis at first. When they became threatening, he looked for allies, since he felt (correctly) that a fair chunk of Western opposition to Hitler was "Let's you and him fight". The negotiations with Britain and France were going nowhere, as neither of those countries really wanted the alliance all that much. Realizing this, he changed Foreign Ministers from Litvinov to Molotov and formed an alliance with Germany. He didn't think that alliance would last indefinitely, and so he started a "creeping up to war" strategy. Then, of course, he completely failed to expect the Germans to attack when they did, and the reorganization of the tank and mechanized forces was woefully incomplete.
The Communist Parties in other countries did suffer by this. Comintern ordered them to be anti-Nazi in the 1930s, pro-Nazi in the last part of August 1939, and anti-Nazi starting June 22, 1941, and a lot of Communists just left their parties as a result.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes