On May 2, 1945, just days before the end of World War II and two days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun and his team of engineers surrendered to American soldiers.
“The grizzled GISers who took over from von Braun were skeptical of the claims of the urbane and self-assured Germans,” write Emily Carney and Bruce McCandless III in their new book, Star Bound: A Beginner’s Guide to the American Space Program , from Goddard’s Rockets to Goldilocks Planets and Everything in Between” (University of Nebraska Press), out now. He claimed to be Hitler’s chief rocket scientist, the man who invented the V-2, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.
As one soldier recalled thinking, “If we hadn’t caught the greatest scientist in the Third Reich, we certainly would have caught the biggest liar!” But they took him into custody anyway and returned him to the United States, where he was not only free to continue his research, but would become “crucial for the development of the American space program,” the authors write.
When we think of space exploration, the first names that come to mind are usually icons like John Glenn, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the pioneers who became the public faces of our cosmic ambitions. But there were other pioneers who were just as important. “The story of space exploration is stranger and more compelling than you’ve been led to believe,” Carney and McCandless write.
Although Von Braun was an officer in the German Schutzstaffel, or SS, he often claimed that he only did so to avoid imprisonment. In fact, in March 1944, Nazi officials tried to prosecute him for “wanting to build a rocket that could reach the moon, rather than Mons (city in Belgium),” the authors write.
Von Braun was not the only Nazi rocket scientist recruited after the war. Operation Paperclip, a secret American program designed to “secure as much of the dark magic of the Nazi missile program as possible,” the authors write, resulted in the employment of more than 1,600 postwar German scientists, engineers, and technicians.
They included men like Kurt Debus, a former SS officer and future first director of launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center, who “traded his death’s head insignia for a cooler full of Bud and a pair of bowling shoes,” writes Carney and McCandless. And Arthur Rudolph, who led the Saturn V development project at the Marshall Space Center before being investigated for war crimes. And Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the “father of space medicine” who helped design the first pressure suits for astronauts and also allegedly participated in human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp.
The decision to once hire the Nazis as rocket scientists rather than put them on trial was a tactical risk, but it benefited the needs of American space pioneers. “The German Jupiter-C launch vehicle, the V-2’s grandson, lifted America’s first satellite into orbit,” the authors write. Von Braun, with his movie star good looks and enthusiasm for all things American, became a “celebrity emissary from the future.” He rubbed elbows with Walt Disney on national TV, laying out his plans for America’s inevitable journey into space, and became the chief architect of the Apollo Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969.
While reformed Nazis played a key role in getting us into space, the United States “wasn’t starting over in its postwar rocketry,” the authors write. Frank Malina and his team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology, Jack Parsons and Ed Forman, were already developing a liquid-fueled launch vehicle for the military. They were given the unofficial name “Suicide Squad”, thanks to several explosions caused by their rocket experiments, and after they nearly destroyed the lawn in front of Caltech’s Gates Chemistry Laboratory.
The trio called themselves the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, using the word “jet” because “rockets were still a fringe pursuit,” the authors write. Today, JPL is the only NASA-funded research and development center, and has sent rovers to Mars, among other robotic deep-space craft.
Jack Parsons, the JPL co-founder who developed the first solid- or liquid-fueled rocket, “specialized in blowing things up,” the authors write. He also drank heavily and experimented with drugs, and dabbled in occult rituals when not working in the lab. A colleague complained that Parsons had “opened a door to the underworld as a result of one of his mysterious rituals,” Carney and McCandless write.
Several members of the Suicide Squad were investigated by the FBI for their extracurricular activities. Malina was suspected of being a member of the Community Party and Parsons of his involvement in a “black magic cult”. True to his reputation, he died in 1952 at the age of 37, caused by a rocket experiment gone wrong.
Their combined efforts resulted in one of the most historic moments of the 20th century, the moon landing in 1969. But after several years of NASA missions, the late 70s saw a dearth of manned spaceflight. Fortunately, a new generation of space innovators was already on the horizon, and they believed that government “wasn’t the best way to do important things,” the authors write.
It began with David Hannah, a middle-aged Houston real estate investor who had never shown much interest in space exploration, at least until reading a 1976 story in Smithsonian magazine about the American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill.
“O’Neill wrote about his ideas for mining the moon and how massive, self-sustaining, solar-powered celestial cities could be built, maintained, and populated,” Carney and McCandless write. “Humanity was killing [Earth] through overpopulation, pollution and the rapid consumption of its natural resources. To save the planet and ourselves, we had to take to the skies.”
Hannah became convinced that O’Neill, and perhaps God, had ordered her to build rockets. He founded (and funded) Space Services, Inc. of America (SSIA), and in September 1982, they launched the Conestoga 1 rocket—with parts purchased from NASA—from a cow pasture on the Texas Gulf Coast. It reached an altitude of 192 miles before falling back to Earth, making it the first private company to put a rocket into space. It was, as one observer described it, “the Kitty Hawk of the commercial space industry.”
During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, NASA “finally moved to encourage entrepreneurial space operations in a major way through milestone-based contracts for the development of commercial space vehicles,” the authors write. From Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos, the future of space exploration (and colonization) belongs to wealthy entrepreneurs. Last September, tech billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first non-astronaut to walk in space, and in December he was nominated by Trump to run NASA.
To Carney and McCandless, this makes perfect sense. “The rackets, it turns out, run mostly on money,” they write. The United States should support any and all efforts to become a space nation – “and ideally, outstanding space nation, since Great Britain was the preeminent naval power of the nineteenth century,” they write—and to do that, we must recognize that space exploration is no longer the wild and unrealistic fantasy it was during the mid-nineteenth century. 20s, when only Nazi scientists and drunkards practicing the occult dared to dream of conquering it.
“Space is here“, they wrote. “We are in it. The question is, what do we do with it?”
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