not to beat a dead horse

[Monte Davis]

Mike sez:

>  I'm not aware that [von Braun] did a 
> heck of a lot of science either: mostly he contributed a 
> name, a face and a voice to the space program, but that was 
> worth something.

Minor major quibble: he was an engineer and engineering manager, not a
scientist. Nearly all the  science required for chemical rocketry was
complete by 1920: how much energy is available from various fuel-oxidizer
combinations, how much heat and pressure that will create in the combustion
chamber, what nozzle shape extracts the most work from gas expansion, etc.
Everything since has been learning how to build real systems that get as
close as possible to the limits set by the science.

Major minor quibble: he was a *very good* engineer and enginering manager,
one of the best of the 20th century. We tend to deprecate that in favor of
science, tacitly assuming that once something's been proved possible, you
just throw enough resources and people at it, and voila. But how you
organize the application of the resources and people -- recognizing and
recruiting talent, dividing up and sequencing the tasks, judging which
approach is a dead end and which is  worth pursuing --  makes a big
difference.

WvB was superb at that both in Germany and in the US. He was very much a
hands-on program leader, not a figurehead, in developing the Redstone and
Jupiter military missiles in the mid-50s, then the Saturn used for Apollo.
As of 1960, Saturn represented a very risky "giant step" in rocket size and
power in 5 years; that it worked every time, while its Soviet counterpart
the N-1 never did, is traceable in large part to the WvB group (and the
larger American group growing up around it and learning from it) at
Huntsville. That he was also "a face and a voice" -- an effective advocate
both in public and "working the system" within the bureaucracies involved --
was gravy.  

NB: the ICBM race represented a colossal failure of moral vision and
statesmanship, and the moon race imprinted a "great leap forward" mindset at
NASA that has been very counterproductive ever since. But once the political
decisions to pursue both were made, well above WvB's pay grade, they could
have been pursued well or badly. He did them well.