Rethinking How And Who NASA Honors
Keith’s note: Yesterday NASA named its headquarters building after Mary W. Jackson, the first African American female engineer at NASA. By coincidence Wil Pomerantz, Vice President of Virgin Orbit, started a Twitter effort to change the name of Stennis space Center – with some solid reasons based its namesake’s segregationist past as to why it should be considered. I asked via Twitter why the bust of Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun stands in a place of honor at Marshall Spaceflight center – a center whose namesake George C. Marshall had issues with integrating troops during World War II.
At a time when everyone seems to be taking a hard look at commemorating past events with a light shone on racism and the denial of human rights, one would think that someone at NASA would reconsider having the heroic bust of a Nazi SS member who used slave labor to build his rockets as the way to greet people who arrive for work every day at NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center. NASA openly admits that von Braun used slave labor. Yes he was the first center director at Marshall and led a large part of the Apollo effort that landed humans on the Moon. No one is suggesting that this be erased from the history books. But should NASA continue to honor him like this?
Campaign to Rename Stennis Space Center Kicks Off, SpacePolicyOnline
“In a statement, NASA responded that the agency is dedicated to advancing diversity, but did not agree or disagree with the idea of renaming the Center. ‘NASA leadership is sensitive to the discussions of racism, discrimination and inequalities going on around the world. We are aware of conversations about renaming facilities and ae having ongoing discussions with the NASA workforce on this topic. NASA is dedicated to advancing diversity and we will continue to take steps to do so.’ ”
How Much Did Wernher von Braun Know, and When Did He Know It?, Smithsonian
“Michael Neufeld: I agree that he didn’t have much, if any, power. And that to say very much of anything was dangerous for him personally. But, again, I would emphasize his personal responsibility for having gone along with this regime, in its aggressive war plans, in building weapons for Hitler, in being a loyal member of the Third Reich, and being a member of the party and the SS. And being personally responsible for using concentration camp labor.”
Biography of Wernher Von Braun, NASA
“The V-2 assembly plant at the Mittelwerk, near the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, used slave labor, as did a number of other production sites. Von Braun was a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer, yet was also arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 for careless remarks he made about the war and the rocket.”
Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp
“The inmates at Dora-Mittelbau were treated in a brutal and inhumane manner, working 14-hour days and being denied access to basic hygiene, beds, and adequate rations. Around one in three of the roughly 60,000 prisoners who were sent to Dora-Mittelbau died.”
Von Braun ‘led the Apollo effort that landed humans on the Moon’. No he did not. There were 3 Apollo Program managers. Joe Shea from 1963 through the Apollo fire, George Low from post fire through Apollo 12 and James McDivitt from Apollo 13 -17. Von Braun led efforts to popularize space in the 1950s and led early Saturn rocket development, but when it came to using high energy propellants like hydrogen, used in both Saturn V 2nd and 3rd stages, Von Braun was against it. Abe Silverstein led that effort including development of the first high energy upper stage, the Centaur. Saturn V would not have been successful without the hydrogen stages. There was discussion about making von Braun the Apollo program manager after the fire but several top NASA Apollo managers threatened to quit if it were allowed. Von Braun was ‘promoted’ up and out almost as soon as Apollo 11 was complete. Kurt Debus was another NAZI; for a time KSC/Cape Canaveral operated as a sub-entity of MSFC.
That is good that the headquarters was renamed to honor Mary W. Jackson. Best practice is to just name facilities after geographic or geological features if not honoring victims of racism or gender bias in science and engineering.
President Johnson for all his efforts on Civil Rights was still a racist who loved using the “N” word long after it had gone out of style while Sam Houston was a slave owner. So merely renaming JSC after Houston where it’s located will not solve the problem. But naming it Bayou City Space Center after the nickname of Houston based on the geography of the area would work.
In terms of Stennis, renaming it the Gulf Coast Space Center would be good, as would naming it the Revels Space Center after Senator Hiram Revels the first Black Senator.
Still, this action by NASA worries me greatly. Renaming headquarters is properly an event surrounded by gravitas. Anything less has a diminished and trivialized purpose.
In fact, I suppose that it IS trivial. We’ve seen symbolism in the past, haven’t we?
I have opposed wholesale removal of statues, and I oppose the removal of this bust. To some extent, removal grants each one of us the power of burying our memories.
More to the point: I oppose this action because these artifacts give us an opportunity to stand before them while we recognize and accept our shame. “I’m sorry this happened”, we can say to ourselves, or out loud. Whatever is commemorated here must not be repeated. Nor ignored.
This is why ‘context’ – surely a misunderstood word that lacks any sort of collective definition in the minds of Americans – this is why context is critical. The presence of a statue in the public square is, in western white society, a sort of reward for excellence. Perhaps context can provide Americans a way to publicly express the overwhelming shame, and guilt, we ought have.
And, yes, I understand the authority and sensibility we each grant ourselves through the act of looking backwards. “We didn’t know that then!”, might be a retort. Without arguing the facts, the response is simple: “We do now. It was shameful. And I am sorry”.
I agree, for the most part, but I think there is also a problem with people wanting to see things in terms of black and white (the shades, not the racial implication.) In reality, people aren’t 100% heroes or 100% villains. They are almost always a mix of both. So I don’t see the sense in calling someone a hero and erecting a statue, or calling someone a villain and pulling a statue down. To me, it makes more sense to put up a statue about the good things someone did, while also remembering the bad things he did. I guess that’s about the context you mentioned.
But if we are going to be taking down statues and changing names of things and places, we might as well add James Webb to the list. His views on discrimination, racial and social issues, etc. were pretty appalling by modern standards. If (as some have suggested) a statue of President Grant is inappropriate, I’m not sure why a space telescope should be named for James Webb.
Most of the statues honoring traitors to the republic were put up long long after the civil war. It was all part of rewriting southern history and “The Lost Cause”.
I know a lot with not agree with me, but for me it is a clear illustration of white privilege. We allow traitors to the republic to stand in so many public squares but absolutely no respect for sacred native American sites. We bulldoze those without a second thought but tear down a statue of a white traitor to the republic and it is sacrilege.
my $0.02
On the issue of ‘white traitor’: Well, Vlad, you’ll not find much consistency in human behavior, right? 🙂 .
But I still oppose removal. As I have said, removal lets us ignore the ugly facts while allowing, as you’ve pointed out, a “rewriting [of] southern history”.
How we are held in the eyes of future generations matters in each generation, and in ways separate and apart from the monument itself (the temporal specificity of verbs is failing me here). Rather than silence the voices of earlier generations, why not add our own? This is why I think contextual additions are important.
Has that ‘frame of mind’ changed in any meaningful way? That remains to be seen.
I think you mean Republic instead of republican…
Unfortunately, the Wright Brothers memorial at Kitty Hawk has been vandalized and the busts outright removed more times than I can remember over the last few decades. Intellectual arguments may certainly be made about the ethical validity of Wernher’s statue, but either way that goes its days are likely numbered. It seems we like to smash such things (both literally and renaming). Perhaps in the future we rather consider constructing more artistic aniconic representations as a way to capture an individual’s vision and honor their contributions to society, and more importantly help tell the deeper story for future generations. Leave the physical representation for the pictures and the namesake to the history books. Art is too important to be reduced to the token bronze statue, which in itself seems…
No amount of intercession will deny our search for expression. And as you point out, we also have amongst a kind of contrary element. It’s obvious that these contrarians also have a point of view (aside from numbskulls simply finding joy in destruction).
Your notion that adding new modalities of expression is so obvious I wish I’d thought of it. But perhaps it’s something additional, not a replacement?
Our public squares and parks and corners here and there should, if we are to decorate them, in praise and memory of persons and history, easily find people and purpose worthy of such an honor. The statues people have taken down or want (the General Lee’s etc.) were mostly put up with a view to rewrite history, mostly reaffirming who was in charge, racism and all to boot, regardless of who lost the war. These were with no intention to preserve history, these were a slap in the face the apologists of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation and racism gave everyone else.
Dont lose site of peoples justifiable anger here just because a handful of other statues get damaged along the way. An insult stares at you all day, all they were ever really about, and you’d be tearing the statues down too.
Surely we can find better role models to extoll. Women, not just white, male, mostly military figures. You would think we were some warrior centric culture, unable to find a hero without a uniform. Where is the memorial to the scientists, not just Einstein in some corner in DC. If some gray, where is the plaque with the sordid history of Von Braun, along with the accomplishments?
Tear the insults down, all most of these statues were put up as anyway back in the period, not as history, and surely we do not lack for beautiful ways to replace them.
>Women, not just white, male, mostly military figures
Few years ago a discussion on PBS or CSPAN mentioned of all the statues in Central Park, none are women. Come to think of it any statues of women anywhere?
Right now with emotions high with various crisis has forced many of us to acknowledge some ugly things of the past. However, deciding what statues be removed and what to replace might be irrational. i.e. tearing down statue of Grant and other Union generals, he probably has considerable baggage but without him Confederacy probably have won or able to secure their own country. I don’t think that would have been a good thing.
Other than that, as we struggle to get back to the moon, we now have upper NASA management have to deal with these matters along with other stuff. And then there are the technical matters i.e. which is the best lunar lander design.
How about the Conf. statues come down (lawfully) off their pedestals but remain, while the statues get replaced by those of former slaves (or their descendants) who went on to renown, or black heroes who fought to end slavery? Appropriate plaques could be cast which describe the history of each and at least a few lines about the evolution of the nation’s understanding of its founding creed.
I’d suggest that the old statues get melted down and their material be incorporated into the new statues, but I really don’t like total erasure of the past because that’s the first step toward ensuring that evils get repeated. Different peoples on different sides of the evil, true, but the same evils nonetheless.
As for Von Braun and others who have both good and bad in their past, I think we need to be very careful about our standing in judgement. First, there is the potential trap of Presentism. But beyond that, yes, we ought to condemn their obvious sins, certainly, but is it our place to condemn the person? They are not the same thing, and it’s too late to put the person on trial.
I suspect each of us would prefer to hang on firmly to the notion—for every person including our imperfect selves—of the possibility of redemption. He among you who is without sin…. Or, to put it another way, every saint has a past; every sinner has a future.
I would feel very uncomfortable trying to explain the context of why a lone statue of Von Braun occupies that space to a group of Holocaust survivors. I think it should go but if not subtraction then addition may be the answer. My recollection is there is enough space to create a sculpture garden. Perhaps surround the statue with Goddard and Tsiolkovsky or significant contributors to the Apollo program (I would love to see a statue of Abe Silverstein at MSFC!) This might make it clear that Von Braun is not being celebrated for being an exemplary human being but for his technical contributions.
I am never in favor of naming a government facility for a politician when a Medal of Honor winner was born or lived within 25 miles of the site. I would have no trouble renaming Stennis. How about naming it after Wilson Brown (a Mississippian, he fought for the right side in the Civil War and was one of the first blacks to win the medal of honor)?
Marshall is a bit more difficult. He may be an example of the argument that if we only memorialize prefect human beings we will have no memorials [deleted].He certainly opposed desegregation in the army but it may not have been the best time to do it. People forget how unpopular the pre-war draft was and doing it during wartime could have been a disaster. Marshall’s contributions to the country were certainly outsize (rapidly growing and managing the U.S.army during WWII, a Planner of D-day, and the plan that bears his name helped prevent Communism in Western Europe).
Of course the military was desegregated and kind of led the way for civilian society in racial equality.
I basically agree with this. Marshall, for all his flaws, is still clearly worthy of being lauded for his contributions to the country. We need to be very careful in reassessing past figures that the line is not drawn making people like him unworthy of recognition for this.
But General Marshall also had very little to do with the space program so why was a NASA Center named for him? Why not just rename it Redstone Space Center and honor its history in rocket development as the Redstone Arsenal?
I wondered about that too. For a long time ,i thought he must be an Alabamian. He was not. I would guess it was the proximity to Redstone (an Army base) and Eisenhower paying tribute to his old boss and , of course, Marshall’s service to the country. I would not rename a NASA center after a military facility given NASA’s civilian identity.(even though Langley kinda is). I don’t think Bridenstine or the MSFC Center Director is going to take down the VB statue (although they should) or rename the center. if they did rename the center, I would think one of the fallen astronauts from the Apollo or Shuttle programs might be appropriate.Some of the streets at NASA Centers were named after fallen NACA/NASA test pilots.. I would think that Marshall, Patton, Bradley, MacArthur would make fine names for the Army bases currently named after Confederate generals.
The name Huntsville comes from an early settler so its probably not a good one to use as there may be bagagge with it. Apollo or Saturn might be good names given the central role it had in making both happen. If you want to honor someone you could name it for Rep. Benjamin Turner who was a slave that later became a member of Congress where he worked hard to rebuild the state after the Civil War. Booker T. Washington also comes to mine as someone deserving of the honor.
The bright line for me has been that Confederate statues were placed BECAUSE they were members of the Confederacy while for someone like Von Braun the memorial is DESPITE whatever he might have done in WWII.
If we don’t defend that line there’s no good way to defend representations of the Founders. For someone like Stennis, where it’s really an acknowledgement of pork deployment I’m not sure where I fall.
von Braun was a Nazi who used slave labor that resulted in thousands of deaths to build his rockets. Did I miss anything?
That’s not why there is a monument to him at NASA. That’s the difference with the Confederate monuments.
So it is OK to have statues honoring Nazis who used slave labor to build rockets? That is something that NASA should endorse? Yes it did endorse this when the statue was first officially placed on a NASA facility and when it was moved to an even more prominent location. Never Forget.
It always puzzled me why nothing was ever named for Willy Ley, a Jew who was forced to flee Germany to avoid ending up as one of those slave workers, who popularized spaceflight in the dark ages of the 1930’s, 1940’s and early 1950’s when it was seen as a science fantasy. He did far more than anyone in that period to promote spaceflight.
Folks also forget he was writing about global warming in the 1940’s and 1950’s when the only place you could publish such crazy ideas was in the science fiction magazines.
Yes, he was also author of the 1950 book “The Conquest of Space” (I have the hardcover book! price inside $3.95), plus many colored pictures by Chesley Bonestell. Interesting reading, is technical but not too much so can give many an insight about this new thing called space travel. I found this site of a space shuttle model that was designed by Ley. I wonder how many youngsters bought this who later worked on the Space Shuttle itself, http://www.andromedadesigns…
Other than that, looks like many will learn about how our space program came about whether it be better or worse. I wonder if Homer Hickam will share his thoughts on this matter.
That was just one of many popular books Willy Ley wrote on space. But he also wrote one of the classic histories on the development of rocket technology. The first version was “Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere” published in 1944. He kept updating it until the late 1950’s, changing its name as the field changed. The last version was “Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel” in 1958. I strongly recommend it.
Since Willy Ley actually corresponded with both Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard as well as knowing Hermann Orberth it is a wonderful information source on the founding of the field of astronautics. If you are forunate enough to find a July 1944 copy of Astounding Science Fiction you will find a great review of it by Robert Heinlein that basically outlines the story line from his movie “Destination Moon” that was inspired by it. The model you mention was just one of a line of models that was produced by Monogram under Willy Ley’s name.
Thank you all for sharing this information on Willy Ley. Your guidance is much appreciated.
Thanks! I grew up reading his books many years ago. Recently a good biography was published on Willy Ley by Jared S Buss – “Willy Ley: Prophet of the Space Age”. I recommend it highly.
I agree with you, Keith. NASA should establish a memorial listing the thousands of slave laborers who died building V-2s for him at
Dora-Mittelbau to provide some balance to the glorification implicit in the erection of a statue. I’m not for erasing history but for confronting it head-on with as much honesty as possible, brutal though it may be.
You might be able to do that with a statue, but what about the Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium that AAS puts on? How would you put that in context to balance history?
The IAU also renamed Lavoisier D crater on the Moon after Dr. von Braun. How do you put that in context to balance history?
If the IAU had followed the same standards for lunar craters as they apply to asteroids, and decided he was a political or military figure, that wouldn’t be an issue. (I think V2 development would justify saying he was a military figure.) In that case, his name couldn’t have been used until 2045, 100 years after the events in question. By that time, there would be some hope of knowing how history would view him and in what context people would see his name on a map of the Moon.
So does the same apply to those that support communism, whose early leaders imprisoned millions and used slave labor such as in the Gulag? Or the 45 millions murdered in communist China?
There has never been a communist country.. only countries that have called themselves communist or been called communist by others.
I knew several of the old VB Germans in Huntsville well. Was VB a NAZI? I think so. The US milked him for all he had and while doing it allowed VB to be free. Better treatment that the workers in Dora got. The Department of Justice was making the case to strip him of US citizenship and send VB back to Germany before he died. They did that to his boss. That they would do that back in 1976-1977 tells you a lot.
von Braun was a registered NAZI, and an SS officer. It was one of his underlings at Peenemunde, later at the ABMA and then at NASA MSFC, Arthur Rudolph, Director of Saturn V, who lost his U.S. Citizenship and returned to Germany before he was prosecuted.