Pity he wasnāt on it!
Exactly why are you against the advancement of mankindās aerospace technologies?
Iām not. I just wish someone less of a maniac was doing it.
Perhaps Professor Zarkov, or Ming the Merciless. 
Maybe Elon has been watching Fireball XL5 on sunday afternoons. Still love the music from that.
I think many of us would prefer an organisation like NASA to be doing it than a business owned by Musk.
Did you feel this way about the Moon landings where the rocket was designed by the same Nazi that designed the V2 rockets used against England and the early medical data on how humans react to extremes of pressure and vacuum was obtained by experiments on concentration camp inmates?
One of the motorcycles that I had in Germany has the registration number XL5.
Absolutely.
I didnāt know about von Braunās Nazi-era past at the time (I was only 12 when the Apollo 11 landing took place).
According to Wikipedia: Overall FBI conclusions point to von Braunās involvement in the Nazi Party to be purely for the advancement of his academic career, or out of fear of imprisonment or execution.
He was actually arrested by the Gestapo in March 1945 and held in a cell for two weeks, after a colleague reported him for having āa defeatist attitude and possible Communist sympathiesā.
He was released after General Walter Dornberger, head of the rocket programme, pulled some strings.
So I think with von Braun the most you can accuse him of is being an opportunist; in any case itās doubtful that anyone in von Braunās position who didnāt give at least lip-service to the regime would have survived the War. Many who were only suspected of disloyalty ended up in front of firing squads or hanging from meathooks in Plotzensee prison.
Yes there were undoubtedly scientists who had participated in Nazi programmes who were brought to the West under Operation Paperclip. Had they not been, they would have ended up in Soviet Russia. A murky business.
But Musk is here and now, and doing his best to wreck America. I used to admire his SpaceX programme and hoped he would succeed in reaching Mars; now I am glad his project is failing.
But NASA donāt and have never built rockets. They have always had contractors that have designed and built them, always on what is called a ācost plusā basis. Since Apollo, this has given the contractor absolutely no incentive to stick to agreed timescales and every incentive to drag things out for as long as possible as this behaviour earns them lots more money. NASA has no control over this and can impose no penalties for this behaviour so most contracts run over massively in time and money. Congress, who apportion the money for all this are very happy for this to take place as it means that massive amounts of money are spent in their states.
So, itās good for NASA to be able to give private space companies fixed price contracts for services but I just wish that it either wasnāt SpaceX or that the Muskrat had nothing to do with the company. Itās interesting that Boeing decided to take part in a fixed price contract with NASA and have lost multiple billions of dollars on the contract and are over four years late without yet delivering. They of course were the main beneficiary of the āpork barrelā cost plus contracts and have not been able to change their mindset at all.
Although no evidence exists that he had any personal involvement, he did know all about the slave labour employed on the rocket program and the fact that many of these slaves died in awful circumstances. That was well documented by the Nazi apparatus who seemed to have no issues creating copious documentation on pretty much everything they did.
Fully agree with this.
That may well be true. But what would you have had him do about it in the circumstances of Nazi Germany in 1944-45? As I mentioned, he did get arrested by the Gestapo on the mere suspicion of disloyalty (on the word of a colleague).
Would you have had the courage to protest about it and end up being sent to a concentration camp? I donāt think most of us would be so brave, and make a gesture that would have done nothing to stop the abuse of prisoners and slave labourers.
Apparently he is now only in an advisory role following a bust up in the Cabinet when the head of the department for air safety complained that Musk was trying to cut his staff when they were trying to stop air crashes and how did Trump expect him to do that with less staff.
And I guess thatās only going to get worse.
The space race was really the German scientists the Americans had captured competing with the German scientists the Russians had captured.
Iāve been to Mittelbau-Dora, itās grim.
Iām not really trying to make any point one way or another, Iām just saying that he did know about the horrors that were going on but did pretend after the war that he didnāt. Subsequently, documentation seemed to show quite convincingly that he did know.
yes thatās fair comment.
He may have also found his experiences and behaviour through them very difficult to cope with in retrospect, and denial was a way to manage that. People have something built in that requires them to be ārightā all the time, and the magnitude of events in Nazi Germany would likely stay with someone in a way few of us can imagine.
Any nominations for VIP passengers next time?