Asp wrote:
Yeah, the Nazis did find out some valuable stuff about rocketry just because of the amount of money they poured into it but it's greatly exaggerated. Considering that they spent one a half Manhattan Projects on their rocket programs they should have gotten a lot more out of them than they actually did. Goddard taking rocket science as far as he did on a university research budget that was tiny by comparison is a lot more impressive. If we hadn't had any of the Nazis' research I think the USSR and American space programs would have been delayed by maybe two years but not much more.
Von Braun's later role with NASA is also frequently grossly overstated. Initially he wanted to pretty much just toss science aside and blast a rocket at the moon to see what would happen (the "direct ascent" method); lunar orbit rendezvous thankfully won out. He did, to his credit, eventually come around to the LOR way of thinking but still...The primary choice should be the one that needs a bigger rocket than the Saturn? Really?
Explored this question in another thread, (
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/justice-for-von-braun-when-is-there-a-moon-landing.407175/) and I noted that VB's biggest 'contribution' both in Germany and the US was not his engineering or management talent but his charisma. He sold the Nazi's on spending the equivalent of billions in todays dollars on experimentation and research facilities far in advance of what anyone else had to solve problems no one else was even seriously considering. He did something similar in the US where for the first time, (despite extensive efforts by US advocates and scientist) he got a mainstream media publisher in Colliers magazine to take spaceflight as a serious issue and report it as such which in turn made the American government and public take the matter seriously for the first time. Then Disney jumped on the band wagon and people began to believe that space travel and satellites were only a few years away.
Keep in mind that while Goddard did a lot of ground breaking work he was very publicly 'trashed' in the American media, (the New York Times didn't "apologize" and then only half heartedly when Apollo 11 was already on the way to the Moon) over even suggesting space travel was possible and there was so much ridicule and dismissal for rockets that a rocket propulsion company supported officially by the Navy and Army had to call themselves the "Jet Propulsion Laboratory" to avoid NOT being laughed out of financial offices for working on "Buck Rogers" science fiction propulsion!
Despite the very visible use of the V2 on London during the war and serious work being undertaken in the US by the government and industry the average American could NOT take space flight seriously. Not until Colliers.
Not to get too off-topic but I feel the need to correct a few of YOUR misconceptions
1) Everyone (including the Soviets) started with direct ascent since it was the easiest method for initial studies. HOW they got the combined ship to the Moon however differed from plan to plan. Von Braun like most assumed that the ship would initially be launched into LEO and there refueled using Earth-Orbital-Rendezvous (EOR) where ground based tracking and control would allow precise positioning of the launches. Lunar-Orbital-Rendezvous wasn't considered early on simply because the Moon would of course lack those tracking systems. EOR didn't 'require' huge rockets and Von Braun's plan was based on the Saturn-1 booster right up till the LOR decision was made. EOR however was going to take time, and time was the one thing the US didn't have given a less than a decade time-line.
2) None of the biology and human factors "experts" in the US were willing to agree that a human could easily handle the rigors of space travel. In fact most of them assumed a human would be incapacitated by the launch or exposure to zero G and Von Braun followed the same line of reasoning as did most of the "top" scientist in the US so originally designed the Mercury as a fully automated capsule. It's no joke that the astronauts had to pretty much twist the scientist arms to get them to allow them any control at all. The Russians did the same thing planning the flight of Vostok to REQUIRE no manual inputs.
3) One of the points I make in the above cited thread is that without the Germans, (specifically Von Braun) the US would have been even LESS prepared both technologically as well as mentally for Sputnik and Vostok which would have had down-stream effects probably making out panic and response worse than it was in OTL. (Apollo was and will always be a great achievement but it stunted the US space effort and without that 'competition' factor it has regulated space exploration to a very low priority in both public and government support)
Randy