We just ran out of Nazis

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

Maybe the source of the stagnation in our space program over the last 40 years, Buckethead suggests, is not government mismanagement, lack of vision, underfunding, red tape or any of that.

Maybe we just ran out of Nazis. (I guess we hit Peak Nazi back in the 1960s.)

Comments

  1. Red says:

    Rockets have a hard limit of power-vs.-weight trade-offs. Our space program hit a wall in the 70s because we didn’t build Orion.

  2. Isegoria says:

    So, we should have let our Nazis build nuclear-propelled rockets.

  3. David Foster says:

    US missile programs were not as totally dependent on former Nazi rocket scientists as is often believed. The USAF missile efforts were run by General Bernard Schriever, an American of German ancestry and most definitely not a Nazi or a Nazi supporter. While some of his scientists hailed from the Peenemunde crew, his top rocket designer was Ed Hall, an American of Jewish background.

    There’s an interesting biography of General Schriever and his era; my review is here.

  4. Isegoria says:

    In your review of his biography, Schriever comes across as a bit of a Nazi.

    More seriously, I remember reading that review and agreeing with you that it was a different time:

    An interesting (if rather breathless) 1957 TIME cover story about Schriever refers to the general and his crew as “tomorrow’s men.” In retrospect, this was true only if one defined “tomorrow” as the interval between the appearance of the article and, say, July 1969. Actually it could be argued that Schriever was a man of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, the era of the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building. In our current era, the execution of such projects has become difficult almost to the point of impossibility. Schreiver faced down General LeMay and Secretary Talbott..would a modern-day Schriever be able to prevail against the lilliputian army of lawyers, “community activists,” and “public interest” nonprofits who obstruct every single project of any size? Further thoughts on this at my post like swimming in glue, but I’m afraid that the answer is “no,” and will continue to be “no” absent some major changes in our society.

    The book, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, is available cheap, via third-party sellers, on Amazon, for those whose bookcases aren’t already groaning under unsafe loads.

  5. Buckethead says:

    Interestingly, so far as I know there were no Nazis on the Orion project. That might have had dire consequences had the program not been axed before test flights in the early sixties.

    Another home grown program with a low Nazi coefficient was the kiwi nuclear thermal rocket. Instead of cool exploding atomic bomb propulsion, this was Heinlein-style atomic jets — a nuclear pile superheated hydrogen fuel for propulsion. They actually built a test rocket and fired it, but never built a flying version. That program was cancelled in the late sixties IIRC.

    Elon Musk seems to have achieved near-Nazi levels of chemical rocket efficiency with no obvious Nazis. Though one wonders…

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