[FPSPACE] Origins of Russian Rocketry - a Parallax View

[Dwayne Allen Day]

On Sat, 7 Oct 2000, Chuck Donaldson wrote:

>     In general, what was the "conventional wisdom?"  I've heard two.
>     Wisdom #1.  Our (Western) German Scientists were better than their
> German Scientists.
>    or, We (the West) got the best of the deal in
> bringing German rocket personnel to the West. We got all of the good stuff
> shipped by to White Sands.

I cannot speak to the Soviet side of the equation (although there is an
eastern German scholar, Mathias Uhl, who just delivered a paper in Munich
at the SHOT conference that was titled "Stalin's V-2."  Unfortunately the
paper was in German, and my German is only good enough to ask directions 
to the nearest hovercraft repair shop).

However, on the American side, I think history has devoted too much
attention to "our Germans" and not enough to "our Americans."  Everyone
seems to forget that the Huntsville team was only one of several rocket
development teams in the US.  

The Convair and Rocketdyne guys who worked on Navaho, MX-774 and
ultimately the Atlas were all relatively isolated from the Huntsville guys
and they developed some very innovative technology.  Solid propellants
came out of JPL and some other obscure areas and ultimately resulted in
the Minuteman and the large SRBs on Titan and Shuttle.  And then there
were the guys who developed the H2/LOX rockets for Centaur.  

But Sputnik resulted in a number of ignorant and
absurd claims that "our Germans are not as good as their Germans" and then
led to a backlash that implied that "our Germans were *better* than their
Germans."  It was a lot of goofiness, because Vanguard, Atlas, Titan,
Agena and Centaur didn't involve the Germans at all.*

In fact, a good subject for a book would be a comparison of the various
rocket design teams in the US and how they approached and solved different
problems.  Von Braun has gotten all the attention, and there are a few
books on Vanguard and Atlas (and a book on Centaur in the works).  Nobody
has done Agena (although I am, sorta).  It might be useful to show that
lots of people were working on similar problems all over the place.



DDAY



*Actually, there were a couple of German "Paper Clip" guys involved in
Agena and (I think) Centaur.  But in the case of the Agena, all of the
primary people were Americans.