I’m on the same page with Jurph and **Stranger on the Train ** with respect to zee Nazi scientist impact on our space program. But there’s only so much German intellect could have achieved.
A key aspect of our success (i.e., US) was the ability to instrument (via miniturization) the hell out of the US rockets to a much better degree then the Soviets could,. That, more than anything else, was the reason we could step speed up the process of building bleeding edge rockets, and be able to reach the moon so quickly. This isn’t so important when you building a large quantity of simple, expendable rockets designed to put a small 500 kg payload into orbit, because your constraints (and costs) tend to be smaller then one placing a manned payload on the moon.
The ability to collect and analyze all of this telemetry is important because it allows you verify with more certainly whether your performance expectations are being met. Conversely. if it doesn’t work to your expectations, you still stand a better chance of understanding why it failed.
This was one of the main reasons why the Soviets were not able to build a reliable Saturn V like heavy rocket to get to the moon. These boosters were monsters compared to anything they’d done before and required a sophistication in systems monitoring which could only be done via miniturizationth which the Soviets lacked. Perhaps other “simpler” heavy booster schemes could have worked (that I’ve seen) in which the soviet designers envisioned boot-strapping lots of little boosters together–but this entails its own dangers of reliability. (Although, I’m of the opinion that in-fighting within the Soviet Union’s various competing bureaucracies is what ultimately doomed their moon-shot attempt).
This is still just as relevant today as back then. While attending a lunch-time presentation involving the post flight review of the X-43’s mach 9+ flight (we built the rocket), the presenter showed a picture of the interior of the hypersonic vehicle before launch. It was crammed to the gills with electronics.
During the question and answer period, somebody asked, “Does it take that much flight hardware to fly the aircraft?” “No,” the presenter replied, “most of it is for the instrumentation. That, and SCRAMJET operation were the two biggest goals of the program. Stuffing all of the instrumentation was one of the biggest challenges we faced on the program, believe it or not.”
It was absolutely crucial, because the a real world wind tunnel simulation could only simulate the Mach 10 condition for about a millisecond, tops, while the goal was to fly for at least ten seconds in this region. So NASA was forced to rely on computational fluid dynamic software to model this part of the flight envelope and crossed their fingers that they had made some good guesses. With the last flight reaching Mach 9.6, the hard data they collected valdiated there assumptiions and that, indeed, their software was up to the task. Which gives you the confidence in modeling larger hypersonic vehcles in the future.
Without the mass of instrumentation during the test, you couldn’t be certain if it was luck or not.
Of course, with the prize of bleeding edge, comes the problem of reliability. We’re “behind” the Russians in that regard, but that is a matter of what we’re willing to pay for in terms of specialization and cost. The Russians have a history of building more reliable rockets (e.g., the Proton) because 1) it’s cheap and 2) and why reinvent the wheel? As a result, they built enough rockets to shake out most of the bugs (we call it “heritage” in the aerospace community). Of course, a failure is bound to occur (as this link shows).