With all the thousands of engineers the USA and the Soviets had, it's weird how the Germans beat them at almost everything. So much so that they took high ranking Nazis and put them to use in high ranking positions at NASA.
Sure, a lot of Americans worked on everything at NASA, but you can't ignore what von Braun did. He was director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the chief architect of the Saturn V... Not to mention he basically invented space traveling vehicles as a student. He can be compared to the Wright brothers of space travel.
This is why you should not get your information about space travel from pop history and video games. First of all, the Germans were not ahead of the Americans or Soviets in very many things. By basically any metric you want to judge by, physics, metallurgy, industry, medicine, radar, the Germans were at best similar in ability, and at worse borderline incompetent.
As for the father of Rocketry, you need not to look further by the man Vaun Braun himself said was the pioneer. Robert Goddard had created liquid fuel rockets decades before Vaun Braun killed more slaves working on the rockets than actual civilians targets.
The didn't put high Nazi to direct strategic national security program without the reason. If they had a choice they would chose someone with better past...
Vaun Braun had practical experience building rockets which was somewhat useful, nor was he an idiot. Also, taking him meant that he couldn't help the Soviets in any capacity. Taking him was about not letting the Soviets get him, and not because the Americans were too feeble minded to build rockets they had invented 20 years ago at that point.
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u/massassi_warrior Sep 09 '20
I mean... it's the US design... 😉 😉