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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.
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.
You are aware that the implementation of communism is a breach of fundamental human rights?
Any one party system is a breach of fundamental rights. I don't remember "property" in the "Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" quote. Are you arguing that you have the right to property?
The philosopher they were channeling had said life, liberty, body and property. Also the forerunner to the Declaration of Independence was the Virginia Declaration of rights which said "That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."
Later of course property was included as fundamental in the Fifth Amendment which said "No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" and again in the Fourteenth Amendment which says "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
Property is so fundamental that it was one of the earliest rights recognized. The Magna Carta says, "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land."
So yes, we all do have the right to property. It is fundamental.
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.
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.
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.