Project Mars (1953) | Hacker News Reader

Project Mars (1953)

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27 points1970-01-0111 comments

Very weird book. If you read it you will find tropes from all 1950s - mid 60s space exploration hard sci fi. Meteorites pierce a ship. Long periods of free fall require extreme discipline to keep everyone sane. Multi ship expedition, which leaves from a space station.

But this book didn't appear in English until 2006, and the German version was quite different.

Von Braun submitted the manuscript to something like 19 publishers, all rejected it, probably because as fiction, it's rubbish. I'm guessing those 19 manuscript submissions ended up influencing all the other 1950s sci fi under the table.

Or the Collier's Conquest of Space series.

If you like this, you'll probably like Wernher Von Braun's collaborative work with Disney [1][2][3]. (It always surprises me how high pitched his voice is.)

Man in Space [1] https://youtu.be/WFXza9RH7-E?si=kwAbBat2Ey7u6n_M

Man and the Moon [2] https://youtu.be/S_N3EYMgya4?si=AlY1leHp4YDiu2HU

Mars and Beyond [3] https://youtu.be/dk7lf2D848I?si=Dw4-EXT43G-lSRhd

> It always surprises me how high pitched his voice is.

Dr. Strangelove (partly inspired by von Braun) comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hETHHRJGv0

I'm really fond of pre-/early space age books on spacefaring. Have a couple myself from the Soviet side of things. A snapshot of the future from the times when there were incorrect elements in periodic table and it wasn't quite clear how well humans could tolerate zero-g. And illustrations are generally stunning.

I don’t know about this author. If you see Einstein leaving Germany in 1933 because of antisemitism, you don’t wait around for years for things to improve. You get the hell out the country.

But not Wernher von Braun. He actually doubles down and enters the Nazi party in 1937.

You might think poor Wernher, he was probably indoctrinated by his family and they were all Nazis. No. His dad was secretary of agriculture before the Nazi rose to power and his parents withdrew to their estate in Silesia when Hitler dissolved parliament because why wouldn’t you get as far away as possible from such a madman? That was also in 1933.

Looking at Wernher von Braun’s actions after 1939, my limited mind simply cannot grasp how a smart person can then join the SS, support his country in a war of aggression, and willfully participate in the holocaust.

Wernher von Braun was a monster, and just one of the many that the United States willfully rehabilitated. Another great example is Franz Halder, who was effectively allowed to write the history of the war and significantly de-emphasized the military's involvement. 'Myth of the clean Wehrmacht' to learn more about that.

Maybe, but he did not end as a monster.

https://www.nytimes.com/1965/06/14/archives/von-braun-fights...

Surprisingly for a Nazi, or maybe not for an engineering nerd buying into the idealistic propaganda of his new home land, he could be quite naive about human evil. PBS:

> In 1952, von Braun drove the 20 minutes to the all-black Alabama A&M College, to recruit a group of its science majors for a quixotic outreach campaign at a local white high school. One of the A&M students, Clyde Foster, was not really sure what von Braun’s aim was, but he guessed the scientist was looking to get a group of mostly farm kids interested in the wonders of outer space. Why von Braun thought black college students would be the best ambassadors to rural white children is lost to history. The result was that Foster and six other A&M students found themselves standing on stage in front of an auditorium filled with white kids who were known to throw trash and spit from their school bus windows at any blacks they passed. Predictably, “nobody was listening,” Foster said, and the assembly was a disaster.

There's something pretty monstrous about being able to actively participate in the Nazi machine and then put it all behind you as if it never happened. I think "engineering nerds" sometimes get too much of a free pass from the HN crowd.

It's very easy to see how that happens. Intelligence and morality aren't closely coupled, and may even have hardly any overlap at all.

> Looking at Wernher von Braun’s actions after 1939, my limited mind simply cannot grasp how a smart person can then join the SS, support his country in a war of aggression, and willfully participate in the holocaust.

“Smart” doesn’t correlate at all with “moral”.

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