31–40 of 44 posts
Could you please change the title to be less clickbaity? A Nazi rocket... as opposed to communism rockets and god-fearing, democracy rockets? Please.
It was a Nazi rocket through and through, built by slave labor at the Mittelwerk ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk ) and serving as one of Hitler's vengeance weapons. No need to whitewash it.
I was reading "Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute" and they mention Von Braun and his biographical movie "I Aim at the Stars" - he claimed that his wartime work was really motivated by a desire to work on space travel. Some wit thought the movie should perhaps have been called "I Aim at the Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London)".
He was the right man at the right place at the right time in the wrong political environment. He used the Nazi politics for his own means and as soon as it was obvious he dumped them for the Americans.
I don't know if has been translated but there is a great documentary from German television called "Der Raketenmann" (the rocket man) which depicts von Braun's life more critically than "I Aim at the Stars".
I was reading "Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute" and they mention Von Braun and his biographical movie "I Aim at the Stars" - he claimed that his wartime work was really motivated by a desire to work on space travel. Some wit thought the movie should perhaps have been called "I Aim at the Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London)".
I was reading "Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute" and they mention Von Braun and his biographical movie "I Aim at the Stars" - he claimed that his wartime work was really motivated by a desire to work on space travel. Some wit thought the movie should perhaps have been called "I Aim at the Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London)".
Reminds me of Gerald Bull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull
He just wanted to build his space gun. He had no qualms about building artillery for Saddam Hussein if it meant his efforts would get funded.
The BBC has done several TV documentaries over the years about this. Interesting stuff. Equally interesting was the race to break the sound barrier where a bizarre scenario unfolded of the British inventing it but the Americans flying it first (after the Brits shared the design).
The Nazi rockets blew up too many times. They would have killed at least 10 men trying to leave the atmosphere, and then killed one leaving the atmosphere.
Totally predictable ending. The potential for this country to get advanced technology well ahead of it's time getting rejected by bureaucrats because of other priorities (or really it serves none of their short term goals). The same thing happened with our fibre network in the early 90's.
There was a UK rocket that launched a few satellites to orbit. UK is the only country in the world to have have given up space access that it had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow
*a single satellite. The first two launches were suborbital tests; the third launch carried Orba, but failed to reach orbit. Only the fourth and final launch, with Prospero as the payload, successfully reached orbit.
The Nazi rockets blew up too many times. They would have killed at least 10 men trying to leave the atmosphere, and then killed one leaving the atmosphere.
The US took their testing data and combined it with the fruits of Operation Paperclip's R&D to create the Redstone program. The Rocketdyne A7 engine was a direct successor of the A4 and was reliable enough to put the first US astronauts in orbit during the Mercury-Redstone program.
In short, an A4/V-2 would have been reliable enough to serve as the foundation of a British space program as long as it was built to spec without the material substitutions carried out due to wartime shortages.
I think that's a mistake. The V2 had a range of about 300 km ("For the V-2 rocket, just reaching space but with a range of about 330 km, the maximum speed was 1.6 km/s" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-orbital_spaceflight#Speed.... ).
The BBC article goes on to quote “Megaroc was essentially the Mercury-Redstone.” From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_Launch_Vehicl... we see that Mercury-Redstone didn't quite make it to 200 km altitude.
According to http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back/news.526 , there have been no suborbital flights above 192 km.
EDIT: Nope, I'm wrong. Megaroc was supposed to get to 304 km (one million feet). http://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/projects/megaroc . Indeed, it appears that the name is short for "Mega[foot]roc[et]."
The Nazi rockets blew up too many times. They would have killed at least 10 men trying to leave the atmosphere, and then killed one leaving the atmosphere.
The basic design of the A4 engine in the V-2 was a sound concept. The reliability of wartime production was held back by the deteriorating conditions and post-war testting was held back by the aging of the captured components. The US and UK used nothing but captured parts, preferring to iterate on the original design rather than build new components for an old rocket. The US took their testing data and combined it wi…