-----Carried over from
this thread, starting at
this post and immediate responses to it.-----
Yeah, and Operation Paperclip never happened, nor the race beetween USA, Britan and Soviet Union to retrieve as many V2s as possible. And the Mercury-Redstone rocket was not a descendant of the crappy V2s at all, designed by the same guys: von Braun and Arthur Rudolf, who also designed the Saturn V... Come on, nobody like nazis, but give credit where credit is due.
OTOH while the soviets also drank from the nazi fountain, they already had one of the greatest rocket scientists ever: Serguei Koroliov.
This is a different point from what I'm making.
I'm not saying that the Nazis weren't advanced rocketeers - they were hands down the global leaders - it's instead that:
1) Despite their technological edge, the notion that they could have carried this through to the point where they were landing on Mars in the 60's is absurd. They weren't that far ahead. This is a bit like claiming the Chinese would have invented a Warp Drive in '89 if only Chiang Kai-shek had kicked the commies out of the country. It's borderline absurd though thematically, given the West's obsession with Nazi rockets, it makes sense in a setting like that book.
2) The Nazis did not accomplish anything the Allies couldn't have also accomplished had they chosen to do so.
Von Braun spent more money on the V-2 than the US did on the Manhatten Project. For all that spending they got a missile with a range and accuracy so bad that it was completely useless in
both tactical and strategic roles. More people died building it than by it though of course that's got more to do with the Nazis being literal Nazis than the rockets themselves - which to reiterate, were pretty crappy designs.
Absolutely the V-2 was the granddaddy of American and Russian rocket lines all the way to today in some cases. And yes, stolen Nazi technology and personnel kick started rocket programs world-wide. But again, my point is that the Allies were capable of building rockets as good as the Nazis but they saw no utility in it and did not. In the end, hypothetical Allied V-2 equivalents during WWII would have been just as crappy as the real ones which meant they would have been a massive distraction from the overall war effort. No plausible German targets would have been within striking distance of a V-2 type weapon until damn near the end of the war and even then, targets may have been in range but the weapons would not have had the accuracy to hit anything anyways. Even with all the stolen technology and unprecedented levels of spending, it took the Americans and Russians another 15 years to develop strategic and tactical missiles that were
actually useful.
And I wasn't proudly chanting
USA! USA1 USA! when I said the Nazis cribbed from Goddard, either. They absolutely did and you could reasonably make the case that had there been no Goddard* showing the world how to build a liquid rocket engine, there would have been no Von Braun, such was his influence on the field.
You're also being uncharitable by claiming the Redstone and Saturn V were designed by Nazis as well. Yes, captured German scientists played an outsized role in the American missile programs through the 60's but that effort spanned dozens of companies and hundreds of thousands of engineers - the overwhelming majority of whom would have never have had any interaction with Von Braun et al. JPL and Aerojet (two huge players in rocketry) both predated Nazi infusions and worked on a ton of projects that were outside of the scope of what the Americans learned from the V-2. Britain had an active, (though much, much smaller) rocket research field and the Soviets had plenty of talented engineers that could have designed rockets just as well as aircraft.
Engineering was a team sport and while Von Braun was a great coach for the Americans, almost their entire bench was home-grown. Same with the Russians to an even greater extent. None of those countries, least of all the Nazis themselves, could have developed a manned exploration program of the inner solar system by the 60's in any plausible time line in my opinion.
* I was recently debating with
@Timsup2nothin about whether or not Venturi would have recognized every part of a rocket engine based on his research. I say he wouldn't have but Goddard is the first person in history that everyone could agree would recognize every part of a rocket engine. His influence can't be understated, the guy was a prodigy that reduced a bunch of theory to practice while still managing to invent theory of his own. Absolute unit. He wasn't just a technical influence either, he was an actual inspiration that got people, including Von Braun and the entire German rocket research establishment, interested in space flight and rocketry.
