Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #17: The 75th Anniversary of the Rocket Age, with Dr. Michael Neufeld

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

Fifteen years before Sputnik, on a bright 1942 afternoon in northern Germany, a thundering machine of metal and fire pierced the sky, ultimately touching the edge of space for the first time in history. It opened a new era of opportunity and terror with rocket technology. Dr. Michael Neufeld joins us discuss the significance of this test and how it happened.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, Space Policy Edition fans. We'll get started with the October 2017 program in a moment. But Casey and Jason and I wanted to make sure that you knew that we had to record this the day before the first meeting of the reconstituted National Space Council. So you can bet that we will have more to say about that. And Casey Dreyer will join me with a few thoughts on the weekly edition of Planetary Radio that will be posted on our website on Wednesday, October 11th. Just a short commentary, but much more as that National Space Council begins to play its role in space policy here in the United States. Let's get started. Welcome back, space policy fans. It's time again for the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, with this monthly episode that comes to you courtesy of the Planetary Society,

of which, of course, you are all members by now. More about that in a moment. Joining me, as always, are Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy for the Planetary Society. Hello, Casey. Hey, Matt. Hey, Jason. And happy 60th anniversary of the space age. Yes, indeed. Unless you counted from that first successful flight of the V-2,

which I think we'll be hearing quite a bit about later in today's show, because that's going to be your topic and a very special conversation, Casey. Oh, absolutely. Stay tuned because we have a really fun conversation with Dr. Michael Neufeld. He's a curator in the Space History Department at the Smithsonian Institute. Fifteen years before Sputnik, von Braun stood at the cold gray rocket launch facility that he was working with for the Army Ordinance of the Nazi regime at the time and watched the very first successful test launch of what would become the V2 rocket. It's called the A4 at the time, of what would become the V2 rocket. It's called the A4 at the time, 75 years ago this month.

And so we have this really fascinating conversation about von Braun, about the history of the A4 rocket, and the legacy of that rocket in creating the space age that we so enjoy today. So stick around for that interview later. Yeah, all of that coming up after we deal with a few other topics and introduce Jason Callahan, the space policy advisor who lives there within the Beltway in Washington, D.C. Welcome, Jason. Hey, Matt. How are you guys doing?

It's good to be back again. Very well. Thank you. And I know that this is also a topic that you're very interested in, these earliest days of the space age and the development of the A4 and Wernher von Braun. So I look forward to getting your thoughts as well i told all of you i i you know we we work on the assumption that you're already members of the planetary society and if you're not that you're intending to become one so here comes the hard sell you can do it today you can do it right now even while

you're listening at planetary.org membership, because it is our members who make possible Planetary Radio, including the Space Policy Edition. So if you enjoy what you're hearing, if you think this is important to you, and perhaps if we're lucky, if we're fortunate beyond you, that's the place to go. Because the most important way that you can support us right now is by becoming a member of the Planetary Society. So please give that some thought and take some action after you've thought about it. Good plug. I just want to know. I'm sincere in that. Four bucks a month or if you want, you can give more.

And you get the beautiful magazine. So look at all the good benefits. And you feel warm, I think, and fuzzy. It's the self-satisfaction and just general happiness and ease with the world that you have once you become a member, I think is actually one of the most salient selling points here. And in a few moments, we're going to talk about what our members are helping the space policy staff, our space policy representatives accomplish in Washington, D.C. But Jason, first of all, you're just back from Adelaide, Australia. Tell us about what happened at the IAC, the International Astronautical Congress, this

year. This is an annual meeting sponsored by the International Astronautical Federation. And this is their big international meeting that they hold every year in a different country. This year, it was in Adelaide, Australia. international meeting that they hold every year in a different country. This year, it was in Adelaide, Australia. I submitted a paper to discuss some research that I'd been doing here and it was accepted. So I went over with our very small team. Bill Nye was a keynote speaker, had a wonderful time. First and foremost, congratulations to the IAC staff and committees. They put on a tremendous event. A special thanks to all the people in

Adelaide. It was a really wonderful town to visit, and I had a wonderful time there. The people were just tremendous. Highly recommend if you're in Australia, stop by Adelaide. I hear the oysters at the opening ceremony were particularly good and plentiful. Yes. Well, Adelaide is renowned for their oysters, among other things, and they were quite tasty, I have to admit. The big announcement at IAC this year was that Australia has decided to form their own national space agency. It's sort of surprising that they didn't have one, as active as they've been in space for a generation or more. But this is a tremendous step forward. And it really demonstrates Australia is committed to moving forward in space. And I fully applaud their efforts. This is a really

tremendous thing to hear from their government. Really looking forward to it. And that sort of set the tone for the entire IAC conference. It was really sort of electric. It was a lot of fun. On top of that, as I mentioned, Bill Nye gave a keynote speech there on Tuesday night. It was very well attended. It was standing room only. And I thought Bill gave a great performance. He discussed LightSail and then the Planetary Society and sort of highlighted some of our policy efforts. And then we had a great Q&A session at the end and then met with a ton of people from all over the world who came up and asked really good questions. So that was a great event.

Other notable events during the course of the conference, there was a talk by Elon Musk about his Mars plans that I think Jason Davis is going to talk about on your regular show, Matt. Lockheed Martin Space Systems also discussed their Mars base camp plan. They've been moving forward with those plans. And that was really interesting to hear as well. So a lot of interesting things happening regarding Mars, regarding spaceflight in general. It was a tremendous conference. IAC tends to be a fairly technical conference. So there were a lot of papers delivered on all kinds of topics, and the moon was certainly one of those. Interestingly, from sort of the higher level stuff, there was less moon talk, but from the technical aspect, or at least from what I saw, there are a lot of people thinking about the moon, particularly from a commercial aspect at the moment. Indeed, as you said, Jason,

the other Jason, Jason Davis, our digital editor, has a report on the weekly edition of Planetary Radio that came out on October 4th, Wednesday of this week, gives an outline anyway about Elon Musk's revised plan for putting, well, he talks about putting hundreds of people on Mars by the mid-2020s. Jason Davis also has an excellent blog post that goes into much more detail at planetary.org. in much more detail at planetary.org. And our feature guest for the week on Planetary Radio was Brett Binnington, who was the CEO for IAC Adelaide, responsible for you getting all those oysters and making sure it all went well, Jason. Yeah, no, he and his team put on a really tremendous event. I heard from many participants that it was the best IAC that they had ever attended.

Kudos to Adelaide and kudos to Brett and his team for putting on such a great show. And Jason, Jason, remind me, what was the title of the paper that you presented? So the exact title is really long and I don't remember it precisely, But it was basically looking at policy and the formation of a small spacecraft program at NASA for planetary science. where most of the researchers in space science reside, or many of the researchers in space science reside, and how those pressures sort of allowed them to start thinking in terms of small spacecraft differently than perhaps leadership at NASA had, and how it required both sides, both the researchers and leadership, to sort of coalesce around this idea of a small mission program at NASA. So really just looking at how policies formed in the federal government can affect space policy in unexpected and unanticipated ways. Jason Callahan, you are the real deal. So kudos on that presentation.

Speaking of kudos, I want to go to a notable accomplishment by you guys and your associate on the space policy staff of the Planetary Society, Matt Renninger. Some very, very good news to come out of Washington, D.C. Casey. Well, Matt, how often do you get to say that phrase? But yes, that is true. We've made progress so you know one of the big priorities that we've had this year in the space policy and advocacy program at the planetary society has been trying to address what i've been kind of my shorthand is the mars problem you know the robotic mars program at nasa we've talked about it before what missions go after mars 2020 are we going to do sample return

are we going to refresh the the science orbiters and telecommunications orbiters there? What's the plan? We have this cliff of missions that are going to die in the next 10 years just because they're old. And we, through a lot of effort and a lot of effort of our members and a lot of effort by our ground team in DC, Matt and Jason, we helped secure $62 million for the Mars Exploration Program in a budget that just passed the entire House of Representatives. It specifically directed that funding towards a Mars orbiter with the

goal of launching it in 2022. We have another bill in the Senate, which has an additional $75 million for the Mars exploration program. The additional money isn't as directed as it is in the House. And that bill has not yet been voted on by the Senate, but it's currently the latest draft of its overall NASA budget. So in both houses of Congress, we have helped add some funding for the Mars Exploration Program specifically to address these problems that we raised. And again, we were really ahead of anyone else on this issue. No one else was focusing on this issue this year. So we feel very pleased to see the response from Congress on that. We also have seen development from NASA, which we can talk about here in a minute. But fundamentally, every society member should be happy and pat themselves on the back for this effort that we've been really helping to address,

which is what we do with the future of the Mars Exploration Program? How does this kind of thing, how is it that still a pretty small team from the Planetary Society is able to have this sort of influence? I mean, what kind of work was taking place by you guys on the Hill? Matt has the exact numbers. Maybe, Jason, you were there for most of these, but at least 40 meetings with congressional offices during a very intense seven-week period when the budget was being put together. We published this big paper, Jason and I, earlier in the year, Mars in Retrograde, which helped us really lay out the issues clearly. Just a lot of focused work. This is the value of having a dedicated team focused on issues that tend to not get a lot of attention by other either professional organizations or industry organizations or

anyone else. The Planetary Society has the resources entirely due to its membership to support three people on this. The report that you and I wrote was a really intensive product of research reaching out to the community. This was not us just making things up. We went out and figured out what exactly the problem was by talking to the people who are most intimately involved with this, understood what their points were, understood what the dangers were to the program, and were able to encapsulate that into

something that a lay person could read. Matt and I then worked really hard to take that 40-page paper and condense it into a two-page sheet that worked really hard to take that 40-page paper and condense it into a two-page sheet that we were able to take up to staff members on the Hill. And we got tremendous response from people all over the spectrum in Congress. Everybody understood very clearly that this was a problem that they were unaware of and were eager to help fix. So it really was about having the ability to do the research and then the ability to take that research up to Congress and explain it to them in terms that they really understood that allowed us to see this movement on the Mars program. And I think this is really a good example of you just need people and time, right?

You can't shortcut that work that you and Matt did of just going up and explaining and educating people and just really being present on this issue. This is the value of the kind of stuff that we do, but also these are strategic decisions that the organization has made to focus on this. I may be a little biased on this, but I think this is one of the most important services that we offer our members and try to work for. It's a unique service.

We really see results. And I think with this team that we have, and should we keep growing in the future? I think this is just scratching the surface of the ability that we have to help represent our members' deep and fundamental beliefs in Mars exploration, robotic exploration, human exploration on Capitol Hill, and to really help make a difference. And so it's a really great statement of what we can achieve. It's just the starting point. And again, I should emphasize before we get too excited and carried away that this is still overall unresolved for 2018. We've had a

full House vote on one budget, a partial Senate committee vote on another budget, and the ultimate 2018 budget does not get basically decided at this point until December 8th, I believe. And it's when our continuing resolution expires. So there's a couple more months that Congress has to work out its differences on its two budgets and try to pass something. Hopefully, we will have clarity by December. If we don't, then they could either kick the can down the road or shut down the government for kicks. Well, speaking as a member of the Society and on behalf of a lot of members, because we hear from members about how important these efforts by you guys and Matt Renninger are to all of us, I really do congratulate you and thank you for this great work.

And I know that you'll be staying on top of it. this great work, and I know that you'll be staying on top of it. Speaking of Mars, there is some additional news out of NASA regarding sample return. Yeah, this happened, I think, like two days after we recorded our last episode, so a lot has changed for the Mars program in the last month. What we're talking about here is that NASA, for the first time ever, has basically stated its intention to officially pursue sample return. That always has been the goal of the scientific community. But NASA has never talked about it, primarily because they weren't really given the green light to do so by the budgetary masters at the Office of Management and Budget, who controls NASA's ability to request money

for things or to propose projects. You've got to get the budgeteers to stamp off on that. So the fact that NASA and Thomas Zurbuchen, the Associate Administrator of Science, went out publicly and laid out their ambition and intention to pursue sample return in the 2020s, that was a big deal in and of itself. The fact that they just said it. That means NASA is working at some early concept studies to build a rover, a fetch rover to collect the samples by Mars 2020 that it prepares

and to launch it up into Mars orbit. And then they gave some really interesting details of how they want to do this. He called this basically a lean Mars sample return, because the problem has always been, and Jason can talk to this a little more, that this is kind of expensive to do sample return. And that's one of the reasons why they've never really talked about it. It's a hard problem, just engineering wise, to build a rocket that'll launch on its own from another planet, rendezvous in orbit around another planet on its own with a return vehicle that brings it back to Earth that then drops it down somewhere in the Mojave or something like

that. It's a lot of difficult things to do. And every step of the way, everything has to work just right. And none of these have been done before, except for some bits and pieces of sample return from easier sources of samples. And so he laid out this idea. He said no earlier than 2026, but clearly the goal is 2026 launch opportunity. But notably, and kind of surprisingly, in order to pursue that, they are going to step away from trying to build an orbiter. They're not going to try to replace or refresh the telecom orbiter infrastructure at Mars. They're going to try to push our existing assets as far as they can go to change the science orbit of the MAVEN mission to serve as a better communications relay and to really rely on our European partners with the Trace Gas Orbiter to serve any additional needs. So that's the big picture. And it's getting some mixed reviews. But

again, I think fundamentally, it's really important that they've even began to talk about this. To your point, Casey, in the current decadal survey, which came out in 2011, 2012, the highest recommended flagship mission was what became the Mars 2020 rover, which was supposed to be the first of three flagship missions that would bring back samples from Mars to Earth. The idea that you would require three flagship missions to accomplish this goal just demonstrates how difficult this process is.

What this new plan is basically proposing, Mars 2020 is in development now. It will launch. It will have the ability to pick up a sample cache from interesting scientific locations on the surface of Mars. Then some international partner, it's proposed that it be the Europeans, but it could also potentially be JAXA or even an industry partner, will build the Earth return aspect of this. It's an orbiter that will pick up the samples from Mars orbit and bring them back to Earth. So that reduces the number of flagship missions for NASA by one. And then NASA will build the other flagship mission,

which is the small rover to pick up the sample caches created by Mars 2020, bring them back to a Mars ascent vehicle, and put them into Martian orbit for this other orbiter to pick up. The real question at the moment, of course, as you sort of hinted at, we don't know who's producing that second orbiter or how that will play out. But according to the plans that NASA released, that orbiter will actually be responsible for the telecommunications capabilities for the Mars Ascent Vehicle and rover portion of this mission. It's really exciting that NASA is talking about sample return in any capacity. That's really the highlight of these plans being released by Dr. Zurbuchen. But there are still a lot of details to be figured out. And so we're waiting to see what happens with that.

And in the meantime, if somebody comes up with a better plan for an orbiter, we're all in favor of it. But in the meantime, Casey and I are still sort of pushing to find the money in Congress to alleviate NASA's issue with that so that they can either contribute to or build on their own the orbiter for the telecommunications capabilities. The bigger question and kind of the fundamental point of our paper was what is the future? What is this ongoing future of Mars exploration going to look like? In a sense, there's a fundamental weakness that's related to the decadal survey, which basically says Mars sample return over anything else.

And so if you're appealing to the decadal survey argument, which is the right thing to do, the way that they position themselves within the decadal survey priorities, the Mars community, do, the way that they position themselves within the decadal survey priorities, the Mars community, you can pursue something like Dr. Zubukhin proposed, which was, all right, here's your sample return mission. But you don't actually get as much science in the meantime, because that wasn't part of any high priority recommendations in the survey. The other notable thing is once that Earth return vehicle that provides telecom for the the mav uh docks with the stuff it comes home right it leaves by definition right or at least part of it would

leave and what infrastructure then is left at mars does nasa have anything left at mars maybe you would have maven which would be 15 years old or something by that time but that you know maven doesn't even have a camera so you would have a very different state of Mars architecture there after sample return than you do now. And that, I think, makes a lot of Mars scientists nervous because they have, in some sense, you know, enjoyed such a high priority of scientific funding for so long that they're used to multiple missions doing multiple different types of science at the same time. The other interesting thing is that from very early, and we have to emphasize early means

incorrect, but kind of rule of thumb cost estimates for these missions, for just the Fetch Rover and MAV, I think was around $4 billion. Is that right, Jason? Yeah, a little north of so four billion dollars would place just that mission as one of the most expensive flagship missions for planetary science of all time right we just talked about this in our last episode i think it would slot between viking which is around six and change and cassini which is three and change billion. So just that middle mission. And you can again, you can see the conundrum here, which is how do you fit in a $4 billion flagship mission with all

this new technology to launch in 2026, when you're also doing two discovery missions, a new frontiers mission, and a mission to Europa, this is also a flagship mission and may be another one to the surface of Europa. There is not a lot of room here for an orbiter, and this is why we appeal to Congress, because the nice thing about money from the U.S. Treasury is that it's kind of fungible, right? You can print your own money, and there's not hard caps of things or just fundamentally priorities of how you want to spend it.

But again, it's tricky for NASA. And you can see why it's always been so difficult. So this is trying to thread the needle of an affordable plan that advances the top priority of the decadal survey, but by necessity has to slim down on pretty much every other area of Mars research. Casey was being facetious when he said you can just print more money. That's certainly not what we're advocating for. But that said, the idea that there is a limited cap on the federal budget is completely a construct of politics. What we are

suggesting is that this is about priorities, that we as a nation have the resources to do these things. It's a question of whether or not we choose to do them. Well, it is certainly good news, though, about sample return. And thank goodness, NASA saw fit to put that communications package on MAVEN so that it can at least serve as a somewhat serviceable orbital communications package for anything that might be going on down on the Martian surface. We're going to get to that terrific interview that you did, Casey, in just a moment. But Jason, first of all, there was some not quite as good news, in fact, quite a bit not as good news about the James Webb Space Telescope. Yeah, indeed. Casey was just talking a moment ago about the cost of flagship missions and talking about sample return at four plus billion dollars

being one of the most expensive planetary missions. Well, flagships in other divisions can be much larger, particularly in astrophysics. If you think the Hubble Space Telescope or the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently budgeted at about 8.3, 8.4 billion dollars. It's almost 8.8, excuse me, roughly twice what the MSR mission would cost. So we just got a bit of bad news about James Webb last week. People may recall that this mission was originally budgeted for about five or five and a half billion dollars. But in 2011, NASA realized that they had massively under committed to this mission, and it required a rebas baseline, meaning that they looked

at the cost and the schedule. And they had to shift both of those, which meant that they had to go to Congress and talk to Congress and convince them that they needed more money and more time. And the launch date was moved from 2015 to 2018. And the total went from five and a half to a little over eight and a half billion dollars. When Congress agreed to that new arrangement, they were very clear about the fact that they would not accept any further changes to the baseline. Now there's language in legislation that if NASA goes over their baseline cost by 15% or goes over their schedule by six months, then they have to come back to Congress to get authorization or they have to

shut the program down. Well, unfortunately, we were informed last week that JWST is going to slip their launch date from 2018 to 2019. And this is longer than a six month slip. So it's unclear yet exactly whether or not they're going to have to go before Congress again and whether Congress will actually accept this new change. They claim that they've got enough money in reserves to cover the addition to the schedule. So that hopefully will help them. But it's something that we're going to have to keep an eye on. And it's a really unfortunate turn of events. But as you have always kind of pointed out, the mission is in phase D, right? Which is integration, when you

put everything together. And you always talk about, I mean, for as long as I've known you, and you always talk about, I mean, for as long as I've known you, like this is where your cost overruns or time slippage happens. We're seeing the same thing in the SLS right now. When you actually fit everything together, things go wrong and you just don't know until you put everything together.

So this is not entirely, they tried to anticipate this. There was also, let's just mention one other kind of weird thing that happened. And I don't know how closely related this is, but there was actually a traffic jam at the launch site where they launch RAN rockets in Guinea. The Europeans really wanted to launch their delayed mission to Mercury, BepiColombo. They need like a six month processing time and they're unable to do a parallel processing for these big science missions.

And so they actually had to try to argue about who got to launch in 2018 and who had to go to 2019. So interesting that James Webb then went slipped. And this is where, again, I don't know the answer to this, but I wonder how much of this was related to like, well, we've got some extra money. Maybe we can take some extra time to do some of this. We don't have to push ourselves. Maybe we get to save some overtime in advance. I don't know. How much do you think is related to that?

It's probably a little column A, a little column B, right? By this point in any mission, you're really running up against your schedule. Even the best managed missions. This is when people are working nights and weekends to get everything done at the right time. Any excuse to give yourself a little more margin is always welcome, but this much margin is probably more than they needed and probably more than they wanted. Nevertheless, you could make the argument that by not having to run really fast to the finish line, you're less likely to make mistakes and you're increasing the chance of a successful mission. But again, the optics for your stakeholders are not good. Yeah. So I want to go

out and I'm going to go out on a limb and make a bold prediction, which is Congress is not going to cancel the next generation space telescope that they've just spent $7.5 billion building since 2004 at this point. I'm just going to, there's almost, I guarantee there's almost no way, they may complain, but there's no way, I don't want to be wrong in this either, there's no way that they're going to end this now at this far. I mean, very rarely at this far along, because then the whole cost sunk fallacy,

which is a fallacy, but a very effective one, comes in, which is like, you know, we put all this money into it, we might as well finish it and have that mission. Right. But that's precisely the problem on these kinds of things is this is happening at a time when politically, it's probably not a great idea to be going over budget when people are arguing about deficits and arguing about increasing money elsewhere. you could very easily as a project find yourself as the poster child for cost cutting or austerity measures that have nothing to do with how effective or successful your place to be. And it's not even I mean, James Webb, even in particular, has it has had its own specific call out in the legislation of every congressional appropriations since 2011, saying you will not spend more than $8 billion on the on the through phase B on this. Absolutely. In

addition to the the rule that you mentioned earlier, they have a specific line that says thou shall not spend more money than we approved. Yeah. James Webb was moved to a separate budget line out of the astrophysics budget in 2011 under this cost overrun. It doesn't ostensibly affect anything else in astrophysics if you just turn it off, right? You don't have the same matrix management issues. You don't, theoretically, I think that that's actually more in name than in action. But nevertheless, theoretically, it should be easier to turn off than a typical project. It's just not a great position to be in at the moment. That said, I actually agree with you. I don't think that it, I don't think Congress is going to shut it down. Casey, we will all wait to see with a bated breath, whether your prediction comes true.

I'll wait to see with a bated breath whether your prediction comes true. I certainly hope it does. Let's go on into this special feature that we have for our listeners today. Casey, tell us about this conversation that you had just recently with a historian at the Smithsonian that Jason has done some work with. Yeah, and I'll let Jason say a few words, too. But Michael Neufeld, and by the way, he let us know he's been a Planetary Society member since the early 1990s. So thank you, Michael, for that. I was reading a book of his, finally, called Biography on Wernher von Braun, called Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. called Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. And I was just blown away by how good that book was,

just from a perspective of just the detail, the analysis, the insight, the completeness, just what he was able to piece together. It was a wonderful book, and I really recommend, we'll put a link to it on the show, but I really recommend anyone who's interested in the history of space, particularly human spaceflight, read this book interested in the history of space, particularly human spaceflight, read this book to understand the role of Wernher von Braun, both from his childhood to his influences to his period working for the Germans and the Nazis, which we kind of discussed in our interview. And then of course, his whole second career in the United States as one of the most important space advocates of the 20th century. As I was reading that book, I came across a date that kind of surprised me, which was

the very first time that they had a successful test of their liquid-fueled rocket, what would become the V-2. They called it the A-4. I think like the Aggregat-4 is what it was called, was October 2nd, 1942. And I was just kind of surprised to think, I did some math, I think like the Aggregat 4 is what it was called, was October 2nd, 1942. And I was just kind of surprised to think, I did some math, I was like, oh, that was 75 years ago, this October. So it gave me just a nice opportunity to reach out to Dr. Neufeld and say, hey, let's talk about this moment that really was one of the most, you know, a critical point in the history of rocketry and history of space exploration, but also in the history of rocketry and the history of space exploration, but also in the context of what was a horrific war and an effort to fundamentally make a

weapon of terror to kill people with. And so all the complicated aspects of what it means to be a rocket developer, particularly in the early 20th century, and how and where we are now with the 60th anniversary of Sputnik and the just incredibly rapid pace in what has changed in space since then. The fact that we're talking about the next giant space telescope that will peer to 300,000 years after the Big Bang, right, to the burgeoning space business, you can all trace so much of it back to these early efforts

by these rocket pioneers. And so it seemed like it's a great time. So we talk a lot about that moment in 1942, when that first test happened, why it happened, and some of the larger consequences of that. So Jason, I don't know if you want to add anything about Dr. Neufeld or the book itself. Sure. No, I've worked with Mike a couple of times. I've known him for probably a decade at this point. He's an eminent scholar. His book, Casey, the one that you mentioned, is widely viewed within the history community as sort of the definitive work on von Braun. Mike has been working on that book or variations of that book for probably a couple of decades. I don't think

that there is anyone who knows more about Vaughn Brown than Mike. So we're really lucky to have him on the show talking on this topic. He's a really engaging speaker. He's also written a bunch on planetary science of late. He's done a couple articles, did an article in a chapter on the Discovery Program. And he's also done another article on the New Frontiers Program with the New Horizons mission as sort of the first of those flights. He's a great guy. And for those who are unaware, Mike is one of a number of curators at the National Air and Space Museum here in the United States, who does work on space history issues. And hopefully, we'll be able to have some more of them

on the show in the future as well. That'd be terrific. Let's, guys, go on to that conversation, Casey, that you had with Michael Neufeld just a few days ago. It's a nice, long conversation. Absolutely fascinating, I think. And then we'll be back afterward for some closing words. Dr. Michael Neufeld, thank you for joining us today

on the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Yeah, I look forward to talk to you about this. In 1942, on October 3rd, this was out of, and I apologize in advance for my pronunciation of German, but in Peenemunde, right, northern Germany? Pretty good, yeah. All right. The first launch took place. And can you help the the stage or the the situation here where does germany find itself at this point and where does europe find itself in this point of this very first launch of intercontinental well what will become uh new ballistic missiles well i mean of course it was uh actually the third uh test launch of the a4 the first been attempted in June and again in August. And a lot was riding on this launch. So this happened at, I think, 3.58 p.m. on the afternoon of October 3rd, 1942. They got

a nice weather day and they finally got ready to try the third launch of the A-4 missile. A lot was riding on it because the German army had made a lot of promises to Hitler and the Nazi leadership that this was going to be a super weapon, that it was going to become available, and yet so far it hadn't had a successful test. In fact, just like a week or so before the launch, General Dornberger, at that time Colonel Dornberger, Vandervan Brown's boss, had said, basically, it's all on the line, folks. We got to have a success. What had they promised the Nazi leadership at this point? What exactly were they expecting out of this program that they were investing so heavily in? The Army had started the rocket program around 1929,

sort of at the very end of the 20s, when the rocket experimenters of space enthusiasts were still in Berlin, had first worked on solid fuel sort of short-range missiles. So then it became fascinating with the idea that the liquid fuel ballistic missile could be a super weapon, that it could be this surprise weapon that would be a huge technological leap, that you could attack other countries with little or no warning and hit them within a few minutes. They sold the German army leadership on the idea that this liquid-fuel ballistic missile

could be this kind of super weapon, surprise super weapon. That argument carried them through the 30s, but once they got into World War II, they needed priorities, they needed materiel, they needed money, and they really needed to appeal above the army into the Nazi leadership to get support. This idea even came about, we're not even talking about nuclear-tipped. That wasn't even a thought at this point, right? It was just the idea of regular munitions, explosives on the tip of this thing. Right.

Certainly at this point, the only conceptions they had of it were either a high-explosive warhead or they talked about making a chemical warhead, a poison gas warhead. But that idea hadn't gotten very far. It would have been difficult to carry out. The atomic bomb was still not a reality. It only came into even discussion in 1939 when Hahn and Strassman, actually in Berlin, had shown that fission had occurred in uranium, that it even began to be discussed. But linking the two still seemed far away at that point.

So this even predates the Nazis then. This is the Versailles era or Versailles Treaty era situation that they actually reached out to begin rocketry development in advance. Was this in advance of any other country at the time? Was anyone else looking into rocket development? I'll try to simplify the stories, which I can't. A lot of many people in this audience will know something about the origins of space ideas.

And there were a lot of space ideas discussed that the liquid fuel rocket was the potential way to break through to spaceflight in the 1920s. And of course, particularly influential was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, who had been writing since the 1880s and 1890s. In the German-speaking region, Hermann Obert. In America, Robert Goddard. It all thought about rocketry and spaceflight. So there was a lot of spaceflight enthusiasm in the 20s.

There were a lot of theorists writing, notably in German and Russian, about the possibility of going into space. And that was the context in which people like Wernher von Braun grew up, you know, as kind of the first wave of teenage space nerds in the 1920s, believing that this was coming soon and in the future. The German army at this point, the history of Germany was the catastrophic defeat at the end of World War I, a revolution that overthrew the Kaiser and the creation of a democratic republic, the Weimar Republic. And the Versailles Treaty had imposed a severe cut on the forces allowed to Germany. No air force, very small navy, and an army of only 100,000 men total.

very small Navy and an army of only 100,000 men total. And so the German army was casting about for weapons that might break through the limitations of what they, they were living, living with a very tight limits, although they tried as much as possible to cheat and they were cheating. And notably they had a secret agreement with the Soviet red army because the new Soviet union was also kind of a pariah and they were secretly cooperating on various things. In a way, the strictness of this Versailles Treaty actually kind of forced the hand, forced them to be more creative, to take

larger risks that other countries may not have bothered to do because they weren't under the same restrictive development forces for their own self-defense or national defense. Now, it's one of the sort of myths of the German rocket program that the German army developed it because it's not mentioned in the Versailles Treaty. I think that's greatly overrated or completely unimportant in spite of it being repeated a million times. But you lay out the correct context. The German army is looking for something radical and new when other armies are much more conventional. And it's partly out of a desperation sense of they're so limited by the treaty, although they're cheating on it and trying very hard to get around it. There's still a lot of limits on what they could do. Okay. So we have the situation where the German army has been investing in rocketry

for throughout the 1930s. As part of that, they hired this, let's say, maybe brash, but highly confident, charming, apparently very good looking engineer named Wernher von Braun. And something that really struck me reading your book was just how young he was when he started working for the German army. How young was he and how did they bring him into this? You said he was a rocket nerd, which I really love that description. How did he get involved? Yeah, that's the first era of the 1920s is the first year where you get this wave of spaceflight true believers. But von Braun was only 20 years old when they brought him in.

But you have to remember at that point, he was brought in at the end of 1932 as a doctoral student. He wasn't in charge of a big program or anything else. They brought him on. They said, we'll sponsor your dissertation, a PhD dissertation, if you work in secret at this Army facility on liquid fuel rocketry. And von Braun was fine with that, because as far as, at least as he later said, the amateur experiments that had been going on in Berlin had kind of reached a dead end. And how far could you go with this amateur exploration? He was happy to take the money. As I indicate in my book, Another context is that he came from the Prussian aristocracy.

In fact, he was a bearer. Yeah, that was fascinating. And he was raised in this very conservative, nationalist, aristocratic family. I think working for the army actually made his sort of crazy enthusiasm more tolerable to his parents and the family. Because, I mean mean this was not a proper career for a prussian baron even being an engineer let alone working on rockets and so i think working for the army was fine with him he had uncles and and and grandfather who are army

officers uh that wasn't a problem for him. What changed very fast was that, you know, right after he started with the army, Hitler came to power. And, you know, within a couple of years, they were throwing a lot more money at it. That change, was it related to the Nazi ideology or their more aggressive stance or plans for war? Why did the Nazis start increasing the level of investment in rocketry? Well, you know, I mean, I don't think they even knew they were investing in rocketry. The Nazi leader showed the Nazi party who had no knowledge of this really or interest at that point.

But the army was getting more money. That was the bottom line. Hitler came to power with a clear agenda to rearm, reconquer, take back the lands that had been demilitarized in the Rhineland and then take land away from neighboring countries. And so, you know, it was a clear strategy from the beginning was we're going to violate the Versailles Treaty and when we feel safe enough, we're going to just publicly declare that we no longer respect the Versailles Treaty. We're going to do what we want. So rearmament was a priority.

Nobody in 1933 could predict that the war would come in 1939. In fact, the military leadership didn't want a war that soon at all. But, you know, they were throwing more money at the Army, and the Army was interested in this idea, which in the early 30s was still very small and not a lot of money and just kind of a radical idea on the margins of artillery development. It's interesting to me, again, the comparison between von Braun and, let's say, Goddard back in the United States, where he had to really scramble for funding basically his entire career

and to try, he was aggressively trying to sell his capability to the army or anyone who would listen. And here you had von Braun who kind of jumped at the opportunity to be, to work directly for the army, for a regime that became very aggressive. And again, as you really nicely highlight in your book, he didn't really seem to care that much when the Nazis took power. It wasn't, as you said, kind of maybe his Prussian upbringing or respect for authority or just a very strong authoritarian stance from a state. It didn't really dissuade him at all. And you had this just so much more government funding coming in to pick up an area where really it's hard to do, as Goddard kind of showed, independently on private funding.

Well, up to a point. I mean, I would argue with that because that's essentially the traditional way to look at Goddard. And as my colleague, Tom Crouch, at the museum once pointed out, Goddard was one of the best funded scientists in the United States in the 1930s. He had Guggenheim Foundation money because of Charles Lindbergh's intervention. He was a little frustrated that the U.S. military took no interest until the beginning of World War II. I think the real contrast between the two is more about their ability to deal with the creation of a radical new technology. that he just could not get out of the model of being a lone inventor with a handful of assistants. He had no idea how to scale this technology up to assemble a large group of diverse specialists and to forge a military industrial team of a major size.

And that was the brilliance of Wernher von Braun and also in germ in in russia sergey pavlovich kolyov was they knew how to pull together a large team of people and to assemble the kind of group that you needed to invent something that was really new so goddard ended up confined becoming in some ways a technological failure he set all these first though he didn't hardly tell anybody about them, but he couldn't break through to developing a large-scale technology. Do you think that had something to do with the American inventor complex, like the Edison style or that kind of idea of the solo inventor being a cultural impact versus a different culture in Germany or Russia? A little bit. I mean, certainly that was an idea. I mean,

you can see in that early 20s and 30s period in the media and everywhere else, and not just in the United States, you know, this fascination with a kind of lone inventor mythology. In fact, Edison was far from the lone inventor. Edison developed these massive invention complexes in New Jersey, at West Orange, and his other laboratories. So he was very good at scaling up and developing technologies. But yeah, the Cologne inventor, but mostly it was just Goddard's personality. He couldn't seem to break out of being secretive and working with anybody except for a handful of associates. You know, I mean, I assess Goddard as whose real importance was inspiring other people to think that space travel was possible.

In spite of inventing the liquid or launching the world's first liquid fuel rocket, he actually was kind of a technological dead end. And he couldn't figure out how to get far enough after he had gotten to a certain level of developing rockets. and to a certain level of developing rockets. Van Braun is really the kind of, one of the earliest examples of this kind of sort of military industrial project manager, somebody who can take these huge institutions and meld them together to go in the right direction. I mean, that was Van Braun's real genius.

It wasn't inventing bits of rocket technology. I mean, he was about as good as a lot of other people. But in terms of assembling a team, inspiring a team, knowing how to bring together, in his case, in order to get to the V2, the A4, which was then later called the V2 by the propaganda ministry, he had to figure out how to bring in chemical engineers, aerodynamicists, metallurgists, guidance and control people. He had to meld all these different groups and try to inspire them to go in the same direction. Yeah, something you point out in your book that, again, I thought was just a really fascinating insight was this was before the invention or

deployment of systems engineering, which is how particularly came in, as you pointed out, during the early stages of the Cold War, when you had these massive programs really winding up. And you basically say that Von Braun himself was the systems engineering check. He was the person with everything of this program in his head, holding it all together, which just seems like an extraordinary amount of pressure and stress for one 20-year-old to early 30s. Yeah, or 30-year-old. Yeah, I mean, exactly. I mean, that's part of what's interesting.

I mean, systems engineering as we know it was invented by the Air Force for the ICBM program in the 1950s. for the ICBM program in the 1950s. And, you know, it gets more formalized as a series of techniques and management techniques and paperwork and everything else. So in, yeah, Nazi Germany, and several of the rocket engineers who worked under von Braun told me this, at least before they stopped talking to me because of the Nazi issue, that he was the systems engineer. He was the systems manager, effectively, because there really was no such discipline.

And, you know, they would have been in trouble if he hadn't been there. So we had von Braun working with the Army throughout the 1930s on the idea of guided ballistic missiles or rockets. 1930s on the idea of guided ballistic missiles or rockets. And in von Braun's head the entire time, he was always had a far bigger ambitions, obviously, right? He was always, as you put in your book, he was always talking about humans in space or men at this point, gendered men in space, men to the moon and men to Mars. How was that a fringe level of thinking at the time? Was that tolerated? Was that a discussion for polite society to talk about this? How was that interpreted by people? You know, in the 1920s, when this kind of the world, the first space fad broke out, it's sort of around 1924 in Germany and Russia and penetrated in the United States

and Britain just a few years later. But, you know, there was a lot of discussion about space travel in the 20s. It was still, I think, for most people, pretty much of a crackpot topic. How could this possibly happen? But there was a lot of credibility given to it. I mean, you know, in the course of a few decades, you know, we've gone from steamships to railroads, to airplanes, to long-distance aircraft, and so many other inventions. People said, well, you know, we can fly in these, you know, I'm sure, why can't we fly in space? So it had a certain credibility, at least for some people.

And there was a lot of discussion about it. Now, what happened in Nazi Germany, and there's very much a parallel situation in Stalin's Soviet Union, at some point, the totalitarian government, which came into power in Germany in 1933, shut down all discussion of space flight, or almost all discussion of space flight. The same thing happened in parallel

in the communist Soviet Union, because they wanted to concentrate on the rocket as a military weapon, and they wanted to stop public discussion of rocket technology because they saw it as a military technology. So they kind of cut off discussion of spaceflight. And for von Braun, his army officer superiors knew about his space enthusiasm and were sympathetic to it. At least they were willing to tolerate him talking about it. And this was the core of the Faustian bargain that you talk about with von Braun.

The idea that his true passions were space. And you can see, in a sense, the almost superhuman effort that he commits himself to for almost a decade working on this program. He didn't really have a life outside of this, of Pina Munda, yet he was working for a highly practical application of a weapon of terror, effectively. Yeah. I mean, I don't think he ever had a big problem with that. We have to realize, again, he was in this kind of Nazi context, and the army was paying his salary, and he came from a very conservative nationalist, anti-democratic background, and I don't think he had a big problem with the Nazis at all. I mean, my reading of him is that he's not a Nazi ideologue. He doesn't care much about race theory or anti-Semitism, but he also doesn't bother him. He doesn't seem to kind of, that he was getting deeper and deeper enmeshed in the Nazi regime as time went on.

And that sooner or later, he would be put into the situation where he had to do anything to continue his work and stay in power. And so he just- And he would certainly confront that later on in the process of upscaling production of the B-2. Let's talk about the rocket itself and its role. So for the A-4, let's even jump back. So in the 30s, what was the progress leading to this rocket? And what was the pathway that von Braun and his colleagues were working toward in the Army? What was guiding this? The fundamental idea was that the liquid repellent rocket was going to be the great technological

breakthrough, to break through the limitations of rocketry. At this point, you only have essentially with the gunpowder solid rocket, which is very limited, and then you're just beginning to see the double-base solid propellant rocket. But again, that's very short range. So liquid repellents allow this breakthrough in technology. There is a series, a rocket series that von Braun starts after he starts working on his dissertation. Panamina didn't exist until 37. So he was working south of Berlin, Kummersdorf. The A-1 was an early attempted rocket. It didn't work and it was never launched, but an A-2 version was launched in 1930. At the end of 1934, he launched.

A small group then was launched two A-2s at the end of 1934, and it was maybe about the size of a person and had, I've forgotten how much thrust, but we're only talking hundreds of pounds of thrust. And then the next step was the A3, which was a rocket, which is closer to like 20 feet tall and had several thousand pounds of thrust. It was launched in 1937, and it was a miserable failure because all of the guidance technology did not work properly. And they didn't understand the aerodynamics. They didn't understand guidance technology well enough, and it was a big flop. And so they had to, at that point, throw even more money at rocketry because they'd already decided that the next step would dictated to von Braun, should be able to carry a one metric ton warhead over a distance twice that of the Paris gun of 1918.

So about 270 kilometers. I think it's 185 miles if I remember it correctly. So was that the only guiding principle? Was that the set the expectations for it? Was it had to beat the Paris gun by the two times. It was it completely Dornberger's decision. But also the warhead would have been 100 times the Paris gun. That is a full metric ton of explosives. That was what Dornberger said.

That is our first objective for a military weapon. said that is our first objective for a military weapon so general dormer or that time colonel or even earlier lieutenant colonel dormer was the artillery officer who became finn brown's mentor and boss and for and for much of his career in in the german army uh he actually ended up coming to the united states too after the war and was with the air force and then he was with bell aircraft in buffalo but that's a long, that's a side story. This weapon was developed in an artillery context. It was developed by German artillery people, and their idea was the greatest achievement in the history of artillery was the Paris gun, where they launched, they shelled Paris

from like 130 kilometers away in 1918. And part of my point in this book, and also the earlier book that I wrote called The Rocket and the Reich, was this shows the kind of mental limitations of the people who wanted the A4. They couldn't think beyond their artillery

context. Was shelling something, even with a one metric ton warhead, going to be a super weapon? Dubious. They really wanted, they really placed a lot of faith that it would have this enormous surprise effect. This radical new technology would be demoralizing. It would be a sort of a terror weapon that would change the course of a war. And that's what they sold it to the German army leadership as, war-winning, at least war-changing weapon.

So what was the fundamental breakthrough or breakthroughs that had to happen between the A3 and A4? I think guidance, it seems like, was one of the most important. Yeah. I mean, I made this argument in the rocket and the wreck. It's three fundamental technologies. I made this argument in the rocket and the rocket. It's three fundamental technologies. The scale up to the large-scale rocket engine, the aerodynamics, the supersonic aerodynamics, and the guidance and control challenge. So the first was just getting the engine big enough. As I said, there was Goddard, or they were working in the early 30s at like a few hundred pounds of thrust.

That was about where Robert Goddard was. That's about where Sergei Kolyov and the Red Army group was in the early 30s in the Soviet Union was a few hundred pounds of thrust. But to launch this missile, they calculated, they needed an engine of 25 metric tons, about 55,000 pounds of thrust. So it's a huge orders of magnitude increase in the size of a liquid propellant rocket engine and at that time you know they all tended to burn through they would burn through the side and go wild they just blow up i mean just getting even a ordinary rocket engine not to blow up uh was a real Right. And you have these wonderful stories about, I mean, it makes you realize how much of it was just even the quality of the components they were using. The welds would crack.

The inside of a rocket engine is a tough place to be. And they were figuring this out by trial and error of what tolerances they needed to engineer these pieces to. Right. I mean, part of it's trial and error and part of it's mobilizing people from various fields in germany to think about something doing something really new and different a key challenge was just the cooling aspect you know a liquid propellant rocket engine has gases and thousands of degrees how do you just not have the engine not melt on that was the kind of challenge they had to deal with. How do we

cool? One of the thing way, which of course they were not the only one, it was parallel in several countries, was regenerative cooling. You circulate propellant around the engine as a cooling fluid, you know, sort of the walls of the engine. Another way they did, they ended up doing was so-called film cooling. So they would leak a little bit of fuel out along the engine wall, so it would provide a kind of barrier between the hot combustion gases and the wall. And so through trial and error and through getting new engineers into the program, particularly Walter Thiel, who they got as a propulsion engineer, he managed to get them to break through to this 25 metric tons of thrust by around the

beginning of World War II. So that was number one challenge. Number two challenge was, okay, now you're going to launch a missile that's going to be going four or five times the speed of sound. You know, at this point, no airplane had flown through it. Little was known about the aerodynamics of that region. Von Braun went out and looked for people who were on the cutting edge of supersonic aerodynamics. He and Dornberger managed to convince the Army to invest in the world's best supersonic wind tunnel and build one at Peña Mundo. So they built a wind tunnel that could reach Mach 4.4 in 1939. To understand, you know, with that missiles getting towards the end of its powered flight, that it remains stable. And number three challenge was, okay, how do you guide this thing

so that it actually hits a target? That was the biggest challenge of all. And you mentioned an analog computer as one of the ways in which they solved that. Can you just, I just was fascinated by that idea. Can you expand on a little bit on just how they solved some of this guidance problem to make it a place kind of reference system so that you could measure the motion of the missile and also the velocity of the missile. Launching a ballistic missile is fundamentally the same as launching an artillery shell, except in place of the gun barrel, which simultaneously accelerates and guides the shell out the barrel, you've got, in the case of the A4V2, you have one minute of burning. And during that one minute of burning, the missile starts vertically and tilts over until it gets to about 45 degrees angle. And you have to guide it such that it stays on the directional path you want it,

and it reaches the angle and the velocity to hit a particular target. So you have to control all these factors, and you have to stay stable during the early part of the, particularly when you're in the lower part of the atmosphere, you're subject to a lot of aerodynamic pressure and winds and other things. You have to keep the missile stable, not flying out of control and crashing. So you've got the stability problem, and then you've got the tilting over and accelerating and cutting it off at the right moments.

There are all these different things that go into this. And I could go on at length, but to answer your question about the analog computer, one of the things that they found that they really needed was some kind of computer in the guidance system that would take all these inputs from the gyroscopes and tell the control surfaces down on the tail of the missile what to do. The best solution turned out to be an early computer. The best solution turned out to be an early Alabama, had developed his analog computer coming out of

aircraft landing systems, out of guide beams for bringing aircraft into a landing in fog or clouds and so forth. So this is just an immense amount of technological development. How much, and just in terms of resources, this is during a two-front war that the Nazis are fighting. How much resources are they putting towards this program? Well, it accelerates very rapidly. So you have to understand there's a huge change in scale. So von Braun is hired to write his Ph.D. dissertation, and he hired one guy from the old Rockaten Flukplatz Rocket Club to help him. You know, by 1935, he's got a few dozen people.

And then they opened Peenemünde in 1937, and they put him in command of several hundred people. He's 25 years old, and he has already several hundred people working for him. By 1942, when the A-4 is the first successful launch, there are 6,000 people at Peinemünde. Von Braun probably has 2,000 or 3,000 of them working directly for him at age 30. So there's a huge expansion in scale, as well as the fact that they started at the beginning of World War II, they began getting a lot of universities, particularly the engineering universities in Germany to collaborate on this project. So, you know, it's a huge ramp up in scale.

And this is the gulf between what the Germans are doing, what everybody else is doing in rockets, you know. Goddard's plane was one handful of people, you know, and the Soviets were had developed a bigger rocket group, but then they kind of disrupted the whole thing during Stalin's purges. So nobody else had invested this kind of money. And we're talking at this point, hundreds of millions of marks are invested in this project. So von Braun met with Hitler multiple times throughout his career. And it feels like there was maybe one wasn't particularly important in terms of aligning or increasing the priority of this program. And it seemed to happen, was it a couple of years before the first successful test of the A4? Well, I mean, the most famous one is the last one, which on the night of 7th and 8th July, 1943, he went to Hitler's bunker with Dornberger and others to provide a presentation. And that was one that made a lot of big deal out of it, partly because Dornberger's memoir,

V2, which remains a very interesting memoir, although very dishonest in some ways. That's the famous one. Finally, after working on this for years, I was able to establish that he met Hitler four times, or actually five times, I'm sorry. He saw him at a distance in late 33 at Kummersdorf. Again, in early 34, there's a picture of him on the steps of the Kummersdorf officer club with Hitler below on the steps. He was still kind of a young guy and he was up in the back in 1939 he gave hitler a personal tour of the rocket test the rocket engine development at comersdorf which hadn't moved to panamunda yet because they were still constructing and then in

41 he gave hitler a major briefing about the rocket and then the last time was in July 43. So he did see Hitler five times that I can document. It's the meeting in 41, I think, that I was thinking of where Hitler wanted to ramp up production. I forget, it was into thousands or even hundreds of thousands to fire off at one time. And it seemed to be that that was a critical meeting in terms of resource allocation, not just in personnel, but in gasoline and metals and, you know, just the various competing needs of the war machine. It's hard to get. A lot of these materials were scarce at that point. And that seemed to me to be a very critical meeting in terms of ramping up production to actual production as opposed to experimentation. Yeah, well, I mean, it was a step along the way.

Let's put it that way. It was, in hindsight, almost completely forgotten. And Dornberger omits it almost entirely from his memoir, which is very influential for a long time on the account of this. But it does a step towards getting more priorities in 1941. And then after that point, it's really crucial that they have a success with the rocket, which is why the October 42 test was so important, because Hitler was lukewarm about this rocket project in the earlier parts of World War II. He needed convincing that it was going to be revolutionary in importance. And as you mentioned, in August 1941, he has these grandiose visions of thousands of rockets.

He has no idea that it's much more complicated than an artillery shell. He doesn't seem to grasp it. And this was Albert Speer observed his memoir that Hitler was very good with World War I technology. He was a front soldier of the World War I, but he had a hard time grasping these revolutionary new things like nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles. So after that meeting in August 1941, they had to go out and prove that the thing would actually work. And that took another year before they finally had a success.

Once they had this 3rd of October 1942 success, they succeeded in convincing Hitler to start increasing the priorities for production and then permitting production of the missile, which really took off in 1943. So we're back to our starting point, the day of the launch. You record in your book that the first successful launch of the A-4 rocket, it went 56 miles high, so right on the edge of space, as you point out, the first man-made item to kind of really touch the edge of space.

And it landed pretty much where they were expecting it to land, about 118 miles away. And you have two quotes in your book that really stand out to me, that when they basically saw that it was a success finally, you have von Braun and his compatriots cheered, yelled, hugged. Dornberger and Zansen cried and laughed for joy. And again, just that contrast of, I mean, you can kind of understand they've worked so hard for this, but at the same time, the implications of what they're cheering and laughing and crying for joy are, are just so striking in hindsight, I suppose,

but even should have been at the time. You know, I mean, the one hand, Dornberger made a much out of it at his memoir, and it's been remembered since that he gave a speech that night at the officer club talking about the spaceship is born. This is the first road step on the space. But, of course, they always wanted to remember it that way. And in hindsight, in presenting it in the United States and West after World War II, they wanted to make it into a space accomplishment. The German army and the Nazi regime were not spending one mark to go into space. This was about developing a ballistic missile. Dornberger was perfectly happy, and von Braun was perfectly happy

to build a weapon for Nazi Germany. They were believers in Hitler and, to some extent, believers in Nazism to some degree or other. And they were perfectly happy at the same time to be building a weapon for this Nazi conquest of Europe. And that can't be forgotten. And you raise an interesting point that in addition to just being a successful test and notable in terms of space history for for its capability that it was also functioned as a morale boost to the german leadership because this was the war was starting to turn against them at this point uh both on on both fronts it may have influenced this embrace or the promise or maybe just the the blind hope for

these so-called you know super weapons or or forget the blind hope for the so-called super weapons, or forget the exact term, but these extreme kind of high-risk, high-reward investments. Yeah, the term most often here is Wunderwaffe. I mean, this was a point in the war where up until mid-late 1941, it seemed like this inevitable conquest of the Nazi blitzkrieg. You know, they had rolled over everything that rolled deep into the Soviet Union. Everything seemed to be going in the direction of an imminent war winning. And that's part of the reason why the rocket was not necessarily a super high priority for Hitler early in the war. Because, you know, how long was that going to take?

And we want to win the war right away. But when you get to the late 1942 situation after the test, it hits Hitler at a moment where the war suddenly really turns bad. I mean, it was November 1942. That was the month that the British struck back at El Alamein in Egypt and began reversing Rommel. That was the month that American and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria, and that was the month of Stalingrad and the encirclement at Stalingrad. And so everything started to turn in November 1942, and the army is saying, this is a super weapon. You know, deploy this, and we can demoralize the British, maybe knock them out of the war.

That was the kind of argument that was used by the army and also by the Air Force, the Luftwaffe, which was building another thing called the V, which was later called the V1, which was a cruise missile. Which they were initially kind of worried about as competition, but then realized it was kind of complementary to what they were developing anyway, if I remember that correctly. One more thing I wanted to ask on this was, you know, so this was the success, this was the changing point and the point. And then from here on out, I mean, it wasn't easy sailing. There were still tests that went wrong. They were still figuring out this rocket, but it seemed like they were, they began to rush this into production regardless. So they, they didn't really wait around for this. Did they, they really started to ramp up the production of the A4 and,

and for use on the battlefield. Right. I mean, I mean, they were under enormous pressure from the Nazi leadership and the army leadership produce something that's going to actually have an effect on this war. And of course, you you know as we just talked about it was this moment of change where suddenly the inevitable victory of the nazi blitzkrieg no longer seemed inevitable and they needed something else and the nazi leadership started to grasp upon the idea of wonder weapons that were going to change turn the the war around again jet fighters and ballistic missiles and all the things that were going to change, turn the war around again. Jet fighters and ballistic missiles and all the things that were going on in development.

You know, there was a lot of pressure. Produce this weapon. Make a difference in the war. You promised us this was going to be a miracle weapon. You know, actually do it. And so 43 was the year that this program was definitively changed into forget about more advanced missiles and bigger missiles or put those off for the future. We need this thing now. Put it into production.

And, of course, one of the important implications of that was that the introduction of concentration camp labor into the V-2 production came about in 1943 precisely because they needed a labor force to build it. That's exactly what I was leading into with that. And so you have this new weapon, suddenly the needs of the production, I mean, there's not a lot of men left to work in the factories in Germany at this point. And so it sounds just as a broad opportunistic choice, the German government started using the slave labor. Can you talk about how slave labor began to be used? I mean, just like, at what points they bring it in? What were the consequences to the production of the program? Because you would think for something so highly refined and needing such quality of materials and tolerances, that bringing in POWs would not

be the best idea for this. Why did they make that decision? And how did that impact the ultimate production? And also, of course, talk about von Braun's role in this. He saw some of these camps where they were working, right? Yeah. A lot there to unpack. Let me just say that the whole Nazi war economy switched to forced enslaved labor as the war proceeded, in part because of that huge manpower problem with the Eastern Front gobbling up almost, you know, all of German manpower. power, and they increasingly turned to all kinds of forced labor, enslaving the Soviet prisoners of war who had survived, rounding up people from all over occupied Europe and sending them into camps. And one of these many systems was the SS concentration camp system, and that became more and more involved in factory labor in 1942 and 1943. And in fact, I think one of the key moments here is that in April 1942,

Arthur Rudolph was one of von Braun's close associates, later famous for having been forced to leave the country in the 1980s by the U.S. Justice Department over the issue of concentration camp labor. He went and saw slave labor production at a Heinkel aircraft plant outside of Ranienburg, north of Berlin, and said, this is the answer. Let's use concentration camp. They, you know, essentially made their deal with the devil. They said, we're going to bring in concentration camp labor at Peenemünde.

And they were, by that point, also setting up two other rocket factories, one in Austria and one in southern Germany, and actually by the Zeppelin Company, the same company that built airships before. And so they were going to bring concentration camp labor to all these production sites. Slave labor showed up at Peenemünde. There was actually concentration camps at Peenemünde, two small ones, one for the Air Force, one for the Army. It didn't get very far because on August 43,

the Royal Air Force staged an all-out attack on Peenemünde. The result was that the Nazi leadership made an emergency decision. All of the rocket production would be concentrated underground at one plant. They took over an underground storage dump that was in a mines in central Germany near Nordhausen and set up a factory called the Mittelwerk, the Central Works, and attached it was the SS concentration camp, Dora. Von Braun's knowledge of this is, or involvement in this is, he knows what's going on, but he's not very directly involved in this kind of spring, summer of 43

in this concentration camp issue. But once they go underground, he ends up having to go there a lot of times to see the production, to guide, try to make this thing work. To go back to your question about how could you do this, well, they try to do it by essentially routinizing and simplifying and breaking down the jobs such that semi-skilled and unskilled labor could assemble the

parts. All the components are made elsewhere and they're brought to the underground plant to be assembled. There's a lot of German skilled labor in the plant too, but then all the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are filled by concentration camp workers.

So von Braun is mixed up in this. And I should say that because we didn't talk about it before, he had become a party member in 1937. He'd become an SS officer in 1940. Neither one of those he seems to have been very enthused about. He just simply said, okay, I have to do that in order to have my career, so I'll go along with that. So he was an SS officer. But his involvement with concentration camp labor is the core of the moral problem around Wernher von Braun's career in Nazi Germany. And he's a witness to it. He knows a lot about it. And there's room for argument about whether he could have done anything or whether he should have done anything or whether it was too dangerous to say anything.

But as far as I'm concerned, he's implicated simply by being a part of that system. And ultimately, the Gestapo jailed him, and I think as the war went on and went badly, and he himself eventually started to see, I think, as you put in your book, the kind of the evil qualities of the regime that he's been working for for the last 13 years or so. career. But going back to the A4 and the fact that it was ultimately, it was never that successful as a weapon in terms of fundamentally altering the course of the war. But the consequences of it and of the technology that von Braun developed were enormous, not just for the world, but for von Braun himself. How critical was the fact that Von Braun had led this project to success, to him being captured by, well, he was, he chose to be tried to get captured by the allies. How critical was that to him reestablishing himself in the United States and not, you know, I don't know what his likelihood of being persecuted or prosecuted

for war crimes or any other participation in the war was, but certainly it enabled him to begin a whole second chapter to his life in the context of the Cold War. Right. I mean, it was absolutely crucial, clearly, that he kind of represented a program that had been a technological success, even though it was a military failure. I mean, the V-2 was very impressive, very revolutionary. You know, it went from Netherlands to London or Western Germany to Antwerp in five minutes, impacted, you know, at supersonic speeds. It was very impressive.

But in terms of actually killing people and destroying cities, it was an extremely expensive way to drop a one-ton bomb. It was not a military success in any meaningful way, but it was a spectacular technical success that paved the way for the future. So he was desirable. He knew he was desirable, almost really arrogant about it, Dornberger, too, about the fact that they had this revolutionary weapon. And they looked around and they said, the United States is our best option. We're frightened of the communists, and we don't think the British or French can afford us, but the Americans might be interested in this technology.

One of the points that I try to make in my books about this rocket is that it really is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology. It's not the origin of everything the Soviet Union and the United States did because both countries had their own rocket experts and their own rocket programs, but it was a breakthrough in the scale of rockets and guidance and control and everything else that allowed those countries and others to see the future of both the ICBM and the space launch vehicle. And by doing this, the Germans had wasted an enormous number of resources that would be better off spent on something else,

and it was the Allies who benefited from it. They were the ones who could go on in the post-war environment, particularly under a new arms race, the one created by the Cold War, onto spending huge sums of money on rockets. I would think that the view of that, the opportunities completely changed or the whole calculus changed once the atomic bombs were dropped and became public in 45. That's suddenly the value of being able to deliver a payload that isn't that big compared to in conventional munitions, that whole calculus would change now that nuclear weapons arrived on the scene. Right. I mean, I think at least the farsighted saw it in 1945. It did take about a decade to

get to that point where you could really reunite the two because the first atomic bombs were very, very heavy. The farsighted at least saw that if you could unite the ballistic missile with the nuclear warhead, you would have a true super weapon, the super weapon that the V-2 wasn't. It was the thing that could destroy a city with one rocket. At first after the war, I think both sides realized this is still some years away, and we're just going to start playing with this technology and see if we can make it work. But by the 1950s, the full scale, you know, ballistic missile arms race was on. Let's just briefly discuss some of the legacies then of this. So we were already touching upon that. And there's a particular one that happened just about 15 years or so, give or take a few days after that first launch.

And would you draw a direct line between that first launch of the A4 and Sputnik's successful launch into the opening of the space age? You know, absolutely. It was actually 15 years in one day, October 3rd, 42, and October 4th, 1957, to get to the first thing in orbit. Again, you know, with the Soviets, they took a lot from the Germans. They didn't get the top leadership. We got the top leadership, but they grabbed up the technology. They grabbed up some Germans and their own, you know, brilliant people like Karlyov and Valentin Glushko and others, jumped on German technology and started

developing ballistic missiles. And because of the nuclear arms race, you know, you got to rockets big enough to put something in orbit in a big hurry. There's no doubt there is a direct line from the V-2 to the R-7 and its launch of Sputnik in 1957. Did they just take the pieces of the V-2 and I think you said they kind of scrapped their existing work and almost started from the beginning once they saw what the Germans had been doing? One of the things that Stalin ordered them to do

was to copy the V-2. So they made a literal copy. It was the R-1, the first rocket in their ballistic missile series. It was a Soviet copy of it. The United States didn't take that step, but we did copy the engine. And the Air and Space Museum actually has an American-made V-2 engine by North American Aviation. And we developed rockets that were strongly influenced by that. Notably, when von Braun was working for the U.S. Army, he developed the Redstone missile in the 1950s at Huntsville, Alabama. And it is basically a Super V2.

Same propellants, many of the same technologies, but now with a nuclear warhead. There's a direct line, whether it's by direct copying or not, on both sides of the Cold War. line, whether it's by direct copying or not on both sides of the Cold War. And I feel like we should have a whole second show about von Braun and his time in the United States. And I'd love to do that with you in the future. But I fear I want to be respectful of your time here. Is there any other kind of final thoughts about the consequences of this launch? I think, again, in your book, you discuss very eloquently the idea of von Braun's like fundamental contribution

isn't necessarily to the technology of human space exploration, but a whole, he was an advocate, an incredibly important advocate, but to ICBMs and this whole new world of missiles themselves

and this whole opening up in this world of advanced weapons that threaten civilization. Right. I mean, I think that's what I, you know, as I've argued a couple of places, it's the rocket is completely Janus faced. It could be a weapon for mass destruction or it could be a weapon for putting something in space.

And it had both potential in this. And you see this coming directly out of the V2 development as well as Soviet and American rocket development outside of copying the Germans. When you develop it far enough, the same rocket can launch a warhead, you know, halfway around the world or can put something into orbit, a threat to peace and the weight of the planets and the stars. So, you know, it's a really, really protean important technological development of the mid-20th century. Dr. Neufeld, I want to thank you again for joining us on Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Dr. Michael Neufeld is the author of Von Braun, Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War. I highly recommend you read this book. It was so detailed and interesting,

and there's so much more we could talk about here. He's also a senior curator in the Space History Department in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. So, Dr. Newfield, thank you once again. It's been a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you. Casey Dreyer, talking with Michael Neufeld of the Smithsonian Institution. Absolutely fascinating conversation, Casey. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. That was so much fun. I want to talk to him again.

We will. And I probably could have talked to zero for another couple hours. So that was great. That was a lot of fun. Jason, I like your idea of bringing in some of Michael's colleagues there, his associates at the Smithsonian. It is such a great repository for the history of spaceflight as well as aviation. Absolutely. I mean, Casey has made mention a couple of times during the show that, you know, the 75th anniversary of the A4, the

60th anniversary of Sputnik, and people sort of think of these milestones as the beginning of the space age. But there's an entire other story out there discussing the instrumentation and the science of this that's equally fascinating and compelling. So I hope that we're able to talk about some of that as well in the future. Okay, guys, we'll call it quits then, except for asking those of our listeners who just enjoyed that wonderful conversation, and hopefully this entire edition of the Space Policy Edition, to join us, become members if you enjoyed what you heard, if you want to support this kind of programming available to you as a podcast,

and the work behind it that is done by the Space Policy staff at the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer, Jason Callahan, who are with us every month for the Space Policy Edition, and their colleague, Matt Renninger, there in Washington, D.C. You can join by going to planetary.org slash membership. And as Casey has said, it's as cheap as $4 a month.

Quite a deal for being able to further our future in space. Casey, Jason, thanks so much. I look forward to talking to you first Friday in November. Talk to you then. Absolutely. I'll be here. Thanks, guys. See you then.