Keith’s note: As you may recall last year I posted a story “That Time Wernher von Braun’s Rocket Tried To Kill My Father” about my father’s near brush with death from a V-2 attack in London in March 1945 and how he – and later I – grappled with the personal impact of a weapon that fell from space. I visited the impact site in Hyde Park 2016. I recently […]
Rethinking How And Who NASA Honors, earlier post “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 […]
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 […]
Humanity now lives in space permanently. Our spacecraft have left the solar system. Our space telescopes look back to the beginning of time. We are spacefarers. Space technology has its roots in weapons of war. America’s early accomplishments in space were achieved with direct use of Nazi technology and personnel. Russia followed a similar path. Today North Korea, Iran, and other nations use rocket designs with a clear lineage originating […]
Remembering the Nazi Scientist Who Built the Rockets for Apollo, The Atlantic “Few figures in the history of technology provoke a reaction as quickly as Wernher von Braun. The rocket scientist was a card-carrying Nazi who built the world’s first ballistic missile with slave labor from concentration camps. As the war wound down, he surrendered to the Americans and took his rocket-building team and talents to the United States. Eventually, […]
