No V2, when does rocket tech start

WI Hitler and Speer had worked out that the V2 concept as and incredibly poor use of resources and Von Braun was told to go away at an early stage.

Would long range balistice missiles or space travel exist in 2013
 
WI Hitler and Speer had worked out that the V2 concept as and incredibly poor use of resources and Von Braun was told to go away at an early stage.

Would long range balistice missiles or space travel exist in 2013
Yes missiles would exist, there was a lot of basic work being done by men like Goddard.
 
The soviets had quite large rocketry projects before and during the war. The space projects would only be marginally delayed.
 
Yes missiles would exist, there was a lot of advanced work being done by men like Goddard.

Fixed. Von Braun and Oberth were heavily influenced by Robert Goddard. Goddard was asked to inspect captured V2s shortly before his death in 1945 and he said that they were virtually identical to the rockets that he had been flying at Roswell, New Mexico, for the past 30 years.
 
Is it possible that if his rocketry work isn't supported that von Braun could emigrate to the US?
 
Fixed. Von Braun and Oberth were heavily influenced by Robert Goddard. Goddard was asked to inspect captured V2s shortly before his death in 1945 and he said that they were virtually identical to the rockets that he had been flying at Roswell, New Mexico, for the past 30 years.

Yeah, Von Braun did try and elicit advice from Goddard during the 30's but Goddard wouldn't play ball as he knew full well what Von Braun was working towards.
 
Yeah, Von Braun did try and elicit advice from Goddard during the 30's but Goddard wouldn't play ball as he knew full well what Von Braun was working towards.

Its also interesting to note that after his death, Goddard's family sued NASA for patent infringement and won.
 
There was the GALCIT program at Cal Tech during WWII, which helped begin the US (and, indirectly, the PRC)'s rocket programs.
 

Cook

Banned
Yes missiles would exist, there was a lot of basic work being done by men like Goddard.
While liquid fuelled rockets did exist, pioneered by Goddard, and there were missile programs in Russia, neither were at the scale of the V2 program. Von Braun and the V2 had money and resources lavished upon them when all previous programs had operated on a shoestring. Von Braun demonstrated what could actually be done sufficient funding; not as a conventional weapon, as such the V2 was quite useless, but its potential in conjunction with the recently invented atomic bomb made it irresistible.

Without the demonstration of capabilities that the V2 program achieved, long range rocketry would never have received anything like the funding that it did after the war and the space program would have been delayed; probably eventuating as an offshoot of the high speed X-plane programs instead.
 
Where did you get that from? Korolev and a number of others spent the war in a scientific Gulag working on aircraft:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev#Imprisonment

Without the V2 it's unlikely Stalin would have backed the post war programs.
Korolev was discharged in 44 and continued to work on rocket related projects, though within the scope of fixed wing aircraft. Rocket driven large missiles would not be butterflied away. Belated maybe, but not removed. The need to find new ways to deliver nukes would soon pick up that crazy idea of rockets, maybe in 60s rather than late 40s / early 50s.
 
Korolev was discharged in 44 and continued to work on rocket related projects, though within the scope of fixed wing aircraft. Rocket driven large missiles would not be butterflied away. Belated maybe, but not removed. The need to find new ways to deliver nukes would soon pick up that crazy idea of rockets, maybe in 60s rather than late 40s / early 50s.

The rockets programs he was working on were essentially RATOs. Building smaller bombs might have been more of a priority for the USSR and you would probably have seen a proliferation of fast bombers. So yes you might be lucky if anyone advanced the idea of rocketry before the 60s.
 
A early military design by Goddard came in 1917-18. The US Army wanted something lighter than the common 37mm guns as battalion weapons. Goddard stuck a solid fuel motor onto a rifle grenade and had a machine shop make up a launch tube to fit the grenade diameter. The device was tested in 1918 and laid aside post war in favor of mortars. In 1942 it was revived & a warhead from a armor piecing rifle grenade used. "Rocket Launcher M1A1" is commonly known as the Bazooka.

One can speculate that had WWI continued into 1919 the battlefield use of Goddards 1918 design would have raised more interest in the use of rocket powered projectiles.
 
Top