Nazis, Rockets, and Faustian deals

If you get a chance to see this Nova - don't miss it. I caught it the other night. Endlessly fascinating for a multitude of reasons...disgusting, inspirational, on and on.

As far as TV goes this is 10 stars out of 10 - and if any of you do watch it - please let me know what you think.



http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sputnik/vonbraun.html
A kind of Faustian shadow may be discerned in—or imposed on—the fascinating career of Wernher von Braun: a man so possessed of a vision, of an intellectual hunger, that any accommodation may be justified in its pursuit.
—Washington Star editorial, 20 June 1977
Nonetheless, he still managed to produce three more fundamental contributions as a U.S. immigrant and citizen: making spaceflight a reality to the public, leading the team that launched the first American satellite in 1958, and managing the development of the gigantic launch vehicles that sent humans to the Moon. The Saturns were his masterworks; astonishingly, not one failed catastrophically in flight.
The sum total of his accomplishments makes von Braun the most influential rocket engineer and spaceflight advocate of the twentieth century. Others—above all Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Hermann Oberth, and Robert Goddard—proved that spaceflight was technically feasible. Goddard went further, developing the world's first liquid-fuel rocket, but he was a poor engineer and one constitutionally unsuited to leading a larger group. It fell to the second generation of rocket and space enthusiasts—chief among them being von Braun and Sergei Korolev [the Soviet engineer behind Sputnik]—to realize the founders' vision by serving their governments as engineering managers in the development of ballistic missiles, then by selling those governments on the idea of spaceflight. In terms of firsts, Korolev's achievements undoubtedly exceeded von Braun's. His team launched the world's first ICBM, the first satellite, the first object to escape the Earth, the first object to hit the Moon, and the first man and the first woman in space. But his postwar accomplishments were founded on German technology: by Stalin's order, he started over in 1945–46 by copying the V-2.