WI: Early Cold War Air and Space Technology without the German Rocket Program

[Michel Van]

And Convair started on what would become the Atlas ICBM contract in 1946:

http://www.astronautix.com/fam/atlas.htm

So ICBMs will continue apace without the Germans. The greater consequence might be less popularization of space by von Braun, and no moon landing (at least not in the 1960s).

That MX-774 ICBM program start in 1946, after Americans saw the "proof of Concept" with V2 Rocket, But this program was terminated on July 1947.
restart as MX-1593) in September 1951 with research, then finaly in January 1955 go ahead as Weapon System WS107A-l.
So real Atlas ICBM start in 1955 not 1946

I was never very good at economics. How do you calculate labor costs for slave labor?

The SS calculated that very accurate,
They calculated that around 17 million Reichsmark cost the Production site at Nordhausen
And even founded Mittlebau GBMH (for "company with limited liability") for Producktion of V2

Major work force cost is the Transport of slaves from concentration camps by train,
building cost of factory concentration camps
Foot and Water cost were minimum "they had to died from exhaustion and collapse".
Fuel cost of crematory burning the death ( at Nordhausen V2/V1 Factory they dispose allot of them while they decease, were encase in concrete floors)
from 60,000 prisoners slave who work here over 20,000 died until march 1945 and even then the SS force the survivors to walk to next concentration camps

The V2 Production was darkest moment of Mankind

 

[Workable Goblin]

OTL, JPL and JATO were called that to deflect from the fact that they involved rockets. (BTW, a few days ago was the anniversary of one of the first test launches in GALCIT's history.)

Nah, it was because in the 1930s and '40s "jet" meant rocket, or at least could mean rocket, not just gas turbine engine. Science fiction in the period was replete with "jets" that were obviously rockets. It's also not like it was secret that JPL was working on rocket propulsion, either; the founders were a bunch of guys from Caltech who had to be asked to move their experiments out to somewhere more remote (Pasadena, at that time) because they were bothering other people.

 

[Michel Van]

The V2 rocket and A4B had tremendous impact on american Sci-fi
Befor 1940 Sci-fi Spacecraft look like this

After 1945

so without V2 the American Sci-Fi would fly for a while in Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers Craft
were slave shovels uranium into into it's engine as was it a locomotive...