The Space Race and Rocket Science- how important were post-war Nazi scientists?

Factual Questions
1

The little that I know about post-WWII Nazi scientists being recruited by the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. I learned from comedy records of the sixties. Being born in the seventies, I got passing mention of it in one History class or another in school- but over the last decade as I’ve started digging through comedy records from the sixites, I’ve noticed that it was a popular topic of criticism and satire (to name a few: Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, and Tom Lehrer all touch on the subject).

To what extent was the Space Race, and weapons related Rocket Science, decided by which of the two Super Powers had snagged the better Nazi Scientists?

If either side had taken the high road and treated Nazi scientists with no preferential treatment compared to other post-war Nazis, would that country have been placed at a serious disadvantage as the enemy had gobbled up as many Nazi scientists as possible???

2

Pretty important.

The engineering experience from the Nazi rocket programs was a very expensive knowledge base, and some few of the most brilliant of the researchers were well ahead of anyone else in the world in the pragmatics of missile building.

Tris

3

My WAG is that without the core of German engineers, the space program would have been delayed by perhaps 5-10 years. Less if we can count capturing rockets and documents, but not having the engineers.

4

I confess to having a Soviet-biased view of the Space Race, and the bulk of my knowledge starts in the 1960s, so I may be quite out of my depth here. My impression was always that the Soviets had gotten the bulk of the hardware, and a few key scientists, and that the Americans’ position was the inverse.

America made great theoretical gains early, but lacked the expertise in fabrication, assembly, and test. Their approach was to rely on Von Braun &co. to “do that stuff you did for Hitler, but do it for us instead,” while Americans looked on and took notes. Having lots of scientists around meant having lots of theories around… sometimes without enough hardware to test them all. Theoretical work continued apace at the expense of applied manufacturing knowledge, and the U.S. systems were (generally!) delicate and bespoke rockets on the very leading edge of technology.

The Soviets worked diligently to understand each piece of captured hardware but treated their captured scientists as a “cheat sheet,” sometimes ignoring their advice in favor of learning the hard way. Their first indigenous rocket (R-1) was a direct copy of the V-2, built completely with Soviet industrial technology; the idea was to determine if Soviet factories were capable of producing the high-precision parts necessary before moving down the path of theoretical advances. Having lots of hardware around without very many scientists meant that you could do a lot of reverse-engineering but advancing beyond it would require trial and error. This industry- and applications-centered approach (“Let’s make it easy to build and use so we can understand exactly what goes wrong”) led to the Soviets having a highly reliable set of rockets that were more crude and less efficient than their American counterparts. All of their theoretical advances were approved from the very tip-top; Korolev had to propose all of his big programs to Stalin or the Politburo (I forget which).

The Soviets got Sputnik up first because getting something into space doesn’t take very many steps beyond having a V-2 – their emphasis on “slow and careful, even if we’re only getting 90% efficiency” worked in that case. The Americans made it to the moon first because the leap from orbit to the moon is staggeringly complex and required all of the leading technology of the day to work perfectly.

5

The Germans certainly did play a big part of US rocket engineering, but there was a great deal of effort on the part of Robert H. Goddard. He died in 1945, about the time Wernher von Braun came to the US to finish the V-2 program. The Germans certainly helped a great deal, but there was some US talent too.

6

You forgot one big, big, BIG factor. The “space race” was really a back0-burner deal until the Soviets had already demonstrated a lead. It just wasn’t something America noticed or gave priority to, as there were other, more pressing issues.

7

I can’t add much to Jurph’s astute observations, but I’ll note that until the early 'Fifties rockets just weren’t considered a serious weapon or transportation system by the U.S. military. This likely stemmed in part from the fact that the V-2 program was a complete waste for Germany–for the cost of building and crewing a bomber they had a very unlikely chance of hitting near an occupied area and killing at most a couple dozen civilians–and the believe that antipodal rockets capable of intercontinental travel were a notion best relegated to the pages of Amazing Stories. The Soviets paid more attention, in part because of the proximity of their enemies, and also because they already had a significant base of researchers in rocketry. (Many of the fundamental concepts of modern orbital and extra-planetary transit were developed independently by Russian scientists long before the West came up with it, including multiple stages and swing-by or low-energy injection maneuvers.)

The Soviets also focused on cheap and simple, not because they couldn’t dream up or built in prototype more sophisticated designs but because of budgetary constraints and production quality issues. As a result, the Soviets have generally had a higher degree of reliability in space launchers even though the build quality is substantially lower than what would be acceptable on an American system. The Americans have, on the other hand, gone for leading edge–sometimes bleeding edge–performance, which has given the advantage when it came to paring down weight and reaching a little further than dreamed possible. Simplicity as a component design philosophy gets you so far, and then it hobbles you, or indeed, even tears your rocket apart, as the Soviets discovered on the N-1 “moon rocket”.

Goddard played a substantial part in the earlly development of liquid-fuel rocketry (and was a direct inspiration to Von Braun) but was mostly relegated to obscurity and ridicule in his time, and the more recent honoring of his work is a revisionist effort, while Von Braun was directly and immediately responsible for the development of the Redstone, Atlas, and Saturn family of rockets, and his legacy was found in other liquid-fuel rocket systems like Titan and Delta. Without Von Braun, the United States would have been significantly behind the Soviet Union in the development of orbital and ICBM boosters.

Stranger

8

There’s some massive historical irony involved as well.

The answer to how important the Nazi scientists were is: totally. The other posts have already made that clear. Goddard was simply no longer an issue in the 1950s.

Yet what they haven’t mentioned is that the U.S. government wanted it both ways. They definitely exploited the expertise of the Nazis for weapons programs and yet they were dismissive and paranoiac of them when it came to space exploration. Von Braun begged practically on a daily basis for the funding and go-ahead to do missile launches for satellites from the early 1950s on. Yet, even after October 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the government insisted that the Navy’s missile program be given preference. It was only after two failures of the Navy’s Vanguard rocket that von Braun’s Jupiter C/Redstone flew successfully on its first try, finally getting the U.S. into space with Explorer.

The use of Nazi scientists was an extremely controversial issue in the U.S. Von Braun allowed himself to be used in a conscious public relations campaign of books, like his autobiography I Aim at the Stars, articles, and documentaries promoting the peaceful uses of space in order to soften that image of Nazi bombs falling on England. These were successful - and also some of the best information on space that the public received at the time.

Still, von Braun remained a target, especially by comedians.

Best one-liner was Mort Sahl’s, I aim at the stars - but sometimes I hit London. Similar was Tom Lehrer’s song Wernher von Braun:

And these are 1960s references, showing that even the triumph of his Explorer I satellite didn’t erase the bitter memories.

9

I agree that the German V-2 was the basis for later designs, but the V-2 was plagued with design and operational defects. It had no guidance system, and was impossible to aim with any accuracy. As well, its primative engines were likely to burn through and explode on the launch pad. Later designs (like the Jupiter) were much better in design. As another poster said, the V-2 consumed huge resources and provided ery little in return for the German war effort-they would have been better off putting the money into jet fighters.

10

However, Vanguard did manage to launch three satellites into orbit before 1959, and Vanguard had nothing to do with Von Braun’s group, which was focused on the Redstone.

The Atlas and Titan rockets were developed independently of Von Braun’s group, and they were important launch vehicles during the space race. The Atlas rocket did have at least one ex-Peenemunde engineer working on it, but it was primarily an American engineering achievement.

So yes, the Germans helped a lot, and Von Braun in particular had a combination of vision, engineering, and managerial talent that was extremely valuable. But the space program would have existed without him. The Air Force was flying the X-15 in the 50’s, and had plans for an orbital spaceplane, the X-20 Dyna-Soar, which would have flown in the Mercury/Gemini timeframe had not all the funds been diverted to those programs after Sputnik. Who knows? Staying on the Army’s course might have resulted in a better space program today, although it’s doubtful the U.S. would have gotten to the moon anywhere near 1969 on that track.

11

None of these statements is strictly true. The V-2 quite definitely had a guidance system, comprised of two gyroscopes and an integrating accelerometer that would cut off the engines at a predetermined time. Avionic control was provided by a simple analog computer which controlled the vehicle in flight by the use of jet vanes during motor firing and air vanes on the tips of the fins in post-boost flight. Later V-2s could be controlled from a ground station via radio link, although these systems were then in infancy. The V-2 was not especially accurate in modern terms–it would do well to hit London from across the Channel–and due to its small warhead could not be used as a tactical weapon to strike at any particular target with any degree of reliability, but ballistic missile accuracy was not significantly increased by either Soviet or US designers until the late 'Fifties, mostly as a consequence of manned spaceflight programs.

The V-2 engine could only be described as primitive relative to complex, high pressure turbopump engines like the Shuttle Main Engines. In fact, in the V-2 Von Braun pioneered the use of regenerative cooling and the intentional use of protective boundary layers (from small jets milled into the wall of the combustion chamber) to protect the engine and extend its operational life. Several thousand V-2s were successfully launched under difficult conditions (mobile, short notice, fuel of suspect quality), and most flight losses were likely due to problems in quality control and materials from the resource-strapped German war machine. For the time and state of development the V-2 motor was surprisingly efficient and capable.

That it served Germany poorly is the result of overestimating the effect that this non-tactical terror threat had on Britons; frankly, it just pissed them off while doing relatively little damaged compared to the Battle of Britain.

The “stage-and-a-half” concept was definitely derived from the plans of Von Braun’s design team for successors to the V-2. The use of vernier rockets on the Atlas almost certainly derives from the planned A-11 and A-12 space launch vehicles. Von Bruan may not have worked on the problem, but his influence is all over it.

It’s doubtful that the Dyna-Soar would have ever flown. The Dyna-Soar was never more than a conceptual mock-up, and the very significant problems of re-entry control and thermal protection systems were never satisfactorially addressed before Robert McNamara had the funding pulled. The manned Mercury actually flew over a year before the Dyna-Soar was cancelled, and the first manned Gemini flight was about a year and a half afterward.

In any case, the Dyna-Soar also bore hallmarks of being derived from a German program, in this case the Amerika transAtlantic/suborbital bomber promoted by Walter Dornberger. There were several different concepts for the Amerika program, but the most famous is Eugen Sänger’s Slibervogel, an atmosphere-skipping waverider. Although the waverider approach was eventually abandoned for the X-20 concept owing to survivability problems with re-entry heating, it is clearly seen in much of the original promotional images (most posters have a bumpy “wave” at the bottom) and even the last conceptual images and the mockup had a rear horizontal flap clearly intended to be used as a configurable lifting body.

The Germans were exteremely influential in post-WWII rocket designs in both the US and the USSR (though the latter basically leeched them for knowledge and went onto independent development) and we’d have been significantly behind without their involvement. There simply was no large ballistic rocket program in the US before we brought Von Braun’s crew over, and building the experience base and finding the talent to replace that would have taken years.

Stranger

12

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).