Following WWII, a plan to use a Nazi rocket to put a Briton in space • Hacker News Board

Re: Following WWII, a plan to use a Nazi rocket to put a Briton in space

#41

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Tue, Aug 25, 2015, 3:28 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #12

garagemc2 wrote: post #5

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.

"The potential for this country to get advanced technology well ahead of it's time getting rejected by bureaucrats" well I would say that right after the war there really were more important things to do rather than putting people into space.

That's not really true. The UK led the world in aerospace until the mid-50s. If the lead had been kept rather than squandered it would have provided a huge boost to the economy.

The UK could have owned the launch business, and also owned much of the satellite business. It would also have been the first country with ICBMs, which would have changed the balance of power significantly.

There was a serious failure of imagination in Whitehall. Or possibly serious pressure from Washington.

And it happened again and again - as with the cancelled TSR2 project, and more recently with the bizarre decision to buy the F35 for the UK's new carriers, which means they'll have no planes on them for a good 5-10 years.

It's also fair to say the Nazi engineers were even further ahead. By the end of WWII German aerospace was maybe ten years in front of everyone else, with not entirely unrealistic plans for ocean-crossing jets and ICBMs.

If Germany hadn't been run by a psychopath, German technology might be where the US is today.

Re: Following WWII, a plan to use a Nazi rocket to put a Briton in space

#42

Post by mikeash » Tue, Aug 25, 2015, 4:10 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #31

kryptiskt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remember reading that the V2 was a weapon where more people were killed producing it than were killed by it.

But both groups were people the Nazis wanted dead, so this isn't quite as ironic as it might sound at first blush.

Re: Following WWII, a plan to use a Nazi rocket to put a Briton in space

#43

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 26, 2015, 3:25 PM UTC

cc438 wrote: post #38

hadeharian wrote: post #25

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…

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Re: Following WWII, a plan to use a Nazi rocket to put a Briton in space

#44

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 26, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #18

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)".

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