"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not
my department," says Wernher von Braun." - Tom Lehrer
#Twitter and #SpaceX and Musk: A number of folks have mentioned the
venerable "once upon a time" Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun
as an example of NASA happily working with, well, Nazis. In fact, the
U.S. brought very large numbers of German scientists to the U.S. after
WWII, and they essentially built our early space program.
However, there were two big differences from today. First, press and
other news media were much more tightly constrained -- there was no
social media of course. Generally, when the government asked them not
to talk about something, they usually complied.
Second, as far as I know, none of those German scientists went out
daily making pro-fascist public statements guaranteed to raise
controversy and concerns about their loyalty. Quite the opposite, they
kept quiet about their personal feelings and just built rockets. They
didn't want to cause potential trouble for themselves or their
families.
Wernher in fact became quite the "tech celebrity" -- hosting famous TV
shows about the space program for Disney -- where his work on the V2
terror weapons that devastated England, etc. are conveniently ignored.
You can see these on Disney+ by the way. They are indeed classics.
In any case, there are no valid comparisons between those days and the
current days of Musk, NASA, DOD, and SpaceX. -L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
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