Von Braun in the News

[rich]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/us/31huntsville.html?ref=us

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In 1950, this cotton market town in northern
Alabama lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have
revived its mothballed arsenal. The consolation prize was dubious: 118
German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during
World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed
humans could visit the moon.
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=20932
(subscription required)

Rocket Man
By Freeman Dyson
Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War
by Michael J. Neufeld

Knopf/Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 587 pp., $35.00

In the summer of 1944, the population of London was accustomed to the
loud rumbling of a buzz bomb flying overhead, the abrupt silence when
the engine stopped and the bomb began its descent to earth, the
anxious seconds of waiting for the explosion. Buzz bombs, otherwise
known as V-1s, were simple pilotless airplanes, launched from sites
along the French and Dutch coasts. As the summer ended and our armies
drove the Germans out of France, the buzz bombs stopped coming. They
were replaced by a much less disturbing instrument of murder, the V-2
rockets launched from more distant sites in western Holland. The V-2
was not nerve-wracking like the buzz bomb. When a V-2 came down, we
heard the explosion first and the supersonic scream of the descending
rocket afterward. As soon as we heard the explosion, we knew that it
had missed us. The buzz bombs and the V-2 rockets killed a few
thousand people in London, but they hardly disrupted our civilian
activities and had no effect at all on the war that was then raging in
France and in Poland. The rockets had even less effect than the buzz
bombs.

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it would appear that Von Braun's reputation is still intact. Dyson's
article is particularly insufferable

Rich