Shiv,
I would admit upfront that I havent read any of his works, nor a great fan of
his. Btw I do think the Counter arguments provided looks equally hand wavy.
>Udhay, Stephenson, like Arundhati Roy and like all great fiction writers
>builds
>up an elaborate strawman by the use of subtle untruths hidden among reams of
>facts.
>The author builds up the impression that large rockets ("hitherto unimagined
>size") were the brainchild of the sytem created by Hitler. That is wrong. All
the elements were in place before Hitler. he "father of spaceflight" might have
>been Tsiolovsky - who in turn was inspired by Jules Verne. Both rocket planes
>and large unguided rockets had been built outside of Germany before the Hitler
>era. But none was in America,
Don't get me wrong there is quite a big gap between having an idea and
implementing it. It is technically easy to build solid fuel rockets, but non
trivially hard to have liquid fuel ones. Even more harder to do cryogenic ones,
admittedly the Germans managed to crack them all. As for von Braun and etal,
they had significant contribution to Apollo program including f-1 rocket motors
on Saturn V .
Anish Mohammed
Twitter: anishmohammed
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/anishmohammed
On 6 Feb 2011, at 05:00, ss <[email protected]> wrote:
> Udhay, Stephenson, like Arundhati Roy and like all great fiction writers
> builds
> up an elaborate strawman by the use of subtle untruths hidden among reams of
> facts.
>
> There is far too much that is debatable or just plain wrong in that. The
> folowing long post deals with only the first four paragraphs - which are used
> to set the stage to cook up more rubbish later. I refuse to spend time
> writing
> any more. In fact I will stick to 3 paras - the fourth alone requires a
> separate message as explained below.
>
> The author builds up the impression that large rockets ("hitherto unimagined
> size") were the brainchild of the sytem created by Hitler. That is wrong. All
> the elements were in place before Hitler. he "father of spaceflight" might
> have
> been Tsiolovsky - who in turn was inspired by Jules Verne. Both rocket planes
> and large unguided rockets had been built outside of Germany before the
> Hitler
> era. But none was in America,
