So for an oddly specific hypothetical - let’s say Nazi Germany won WWII (in the sense of conquering the European side of Russia, and the Brits and Yanks can never mount a successful D-Day. Hitler consolidates and solidifies all his gains in Europe. Axis, Allies both eventually get nukes, but hold off on launching them at each other.)
Is there still a Space Race, and any Apollo or Nazi manned missions to the Moon?
Perhaps not a space race as it occurred in our history, but if I recall correctly Von Braun was specifically interested in manned missions. A moon expedition does not seem out of line.
Fortunately the NAZIs had zero chances of winning so we got stuck with a politicized “race” that turned into a dead end instead of a stepping stone to the stars.
Yeah, combine the already-existing cohort of Nazis who wanted to go to space with the general Nazi inclination to want to demonstrate their “Aryan superiority” with ostentatious displays of heroism and “Nazi Super-Science!”, and an attempt at a Moon landing would have been an inevitability.
Now, would they screw up that attempt out of the also fairly common Nazi incompetence? Who knows?
Liebenstraum! (however one spells it.)
Send an untermensch first, however that is spelled.
It would probably be easier to bombard North American from satellite than the moon, since it is 250,000 miles away, but I can’t see winning Nazis without a Secret Moon Base.
How are they going to get Zeppelins to the moon?
According to this documentary*, the Nazis actually retreated to the Moon in 1945, and have spent the past 70 years preparing to conquer Earth, using a fleet of space-going zeppelins.
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- Not, in fact, a documentary.
- Not, in fact, a documentary.
I don’t see how the curiosity with space, coupled with new technology, would not have motivated SOMEONE to send men to the moon at some point. It was just too awesome a thing to be left undone. Absent a Cold War I doubt it would have happened as soon as it did, but it would have happened.
Going to bed by the light of a Nazi moon? Unacceptable!
Of course if ever there was a regime that would elaborately fake a moon landing, Nazi Germany has to be one.
Had the Nazi won the war against the West, they would have continued to secure and expand their vital space. For the next decades, everyone would have armed themselves and got involved in further armed conflicts with all the resources being spent on the war effort. There would have been no cold wars, competition for conquering the outer space or even the appetite do so. Authoritarianism would have been the norm and unless a powerful autocrat had managed to impose a certain international Pax (Germanica, Japonica etc.) and developed space rockets on a whim, I don’t think there would have been a manned Moon landing.
Yes, but the Nazis let Von Braun have his way with the V-2 program. If that had continued with lesser or no strictures on funding due to ongoing war (and with a regular fresh supply of slave labor as required), it might not have taken that much more to expand it into a vast propaganda project - all it would take was some salesmanship and flattery of the leadership, and we know he had those abilities. Even as it was, the first US satellite and man-in-space boosters (Jupiter and Redstone) were based on the V-2.
This OP has so many holes . . . but,
I’d say no. The Nazis can’t defeat the United States. And the Nazi state, including the economics part of their state was and was going to continue to be a total mess.
So I don’t see the Nazis in an economic position to do it, and I’m not sure that the U.S. would have the spare cash in that hot war/cold war era to go to the moon.
They would have wanted to go out there and find all that ice. (And by golly, there really is a lot of ice out there. The part about the Sun’s gravitational pull “ceasing to exist” at “three times the distance of Neptune”, not so much. Or all the other stuff. :smack:)
You doubt the ability of Aryan Science to find a gas lighter than vacuum?
To the camps with you!
Joking aside, I picture this being the major obstacle. Given a government that rewards for ruthlessness rather than efficiency or productivity or success, scientists smart enough to participate in a lunar program will end up in the wrong faction at some point and get purged, especially if they talk about math or physics at a level that a thuggish and ambitious politician doesn’t understand, so he declares it all to be heretical “Jewish science” and himself the hero for fighting it.
This was actually a plot point in a science fiction story I read once. A German scientist sabotages the Nazi A-Bomb project by forwarding a detailed technical report to Hitler, instead of the dumbed-down executive summary he was supposed to send. Hitler of course can’t understand a word of it, and declares the whole project a waste of time.
I recall another story in which WWII German troops find an old crashed/abandoned flying saucer. The local Gestapo chief comes to take charge, and seems to be fairly savvy about the potential technological benefits to be gained. They get inside, and find all sorts of alien instrumentation with labels in alien writing… which includes a frequently occurring interlocking-equilateral-triangles glyph. The Gestapo officer orders the “Jew thing” destroyed forthwith.
And that reminds me of a story about aliens landing in the rural US during WWII, and one redneck guns down the “Nazi Alien”, because the symbol on his uniform for “Expedition craft 8” just happens to be a swastika.
I don’t see why there wouldn’t still be a Cold War, or why a Nazi state would be less competitive in a space race than the Communist state was in real life. The Soviets had plenty of ruthless, factional paranoia and nonsensical economics, but they still funded their pet industries basically by pulling energy out of the ground. Spy satellites seem like a natural pursuit during a long cold war (indeed, more important in a hypothetical world where continental Europe is undivided and the scope for human intelligence is narrower), with manned flight an easy-to-imagine vanity project growing out from there.
My favorite “Nazis win WW2” scenario is one where the USA, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany all manage to build atom bombs at around the same time. It’s really the only way the Nazis could “win” the second world war, assuming that MAD kept the fingers off the triggers. So the post-war reality would be a three-way cold war between democracy, fascism, and Japanese imperialism, rather then the capitalism/communism thing that really happened. It would be fun to debate how the global geopolitics would play out, but that’s beyond this thread.
As for Nazis on the moon, it seems to me that there would be a three-way space race. The Nazis would be a severe disadvantage (Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun notwithstanding) due to their race based “science” and non-existent economic policies. I don’t know much about science and economics in the Japanese Empire, but if it were a race between the Third Reich and the United States the USA would have a moon base before the Nazis put a man into orbit.
Nazi Germany will definitely beat the US to a 2-way race to put a man on the moon. The only way it could go the otherwise is if Jesse Owens was born to be at his prime during the manned moon landing.