Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [158]
Wernher von Braun, of course, went on to become NASA’s most famous founding scientist. He took America to the moon, became rich and respected, and fulfilled all his childhood dreams. His past, however, started catching up with him in the early 1970s. After Paris Match, the glossy French magazine, published a glowing article on the handsome space prophet, several readers wrote in to report that they recognized the man in the photographs. He was stouter and grayer than they remembered, but the burning eyes were unmistakably the same. The readers were survivors of Mittelwerk, former V-2 slave laborers, and the accounts they gave of von Braun differed starkly from the magazine’s fawning profile. They claimed he had personally ordered prisoners executed for sabotage and was a war criminal who should face international tribunals.
Nothing came of the allegations, but von Braun spent the final years of his life defending his war record, and he died in 1977 under a growing cloud of suspicion. In 1984, another V-2 veteran, Arthur Rudolf, the designer of the Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon, was quietly extradited to West Germany on identical charges. Von Braun unquestionably deserves a place in American history, but his true legacy remains murky.
As for the legacy of the first space race, the pioneering technology of the era is omnipresent in today’s information age. Satellites govern virtually every aspect of modern life, from communications to credit card transactions to avoiding traffic jams using GPS receivers. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first military campaign in the history of warfare run almost entirely remotely, via satellite. Thanks to microchip implants, satellites monitor the whereabouts of wayward pets and track cargo and stolen vehicles. They transmit television signals to dish owners and cable operators and broadcast the rantings of radio personalities like Howard Stern.
Space is no longer the exclusive domain of superpowers, but increasingly it is a commercial battleground open to all who can afford it. In this new profit-driven arena, OKB-1, Korolev’s old design bureau, is now called Russian Space Corporation Energya, and it supplies the boosters that orbit private U.S. satellites like DirectTV, beaming The Sopranos and National Football League packages to millions of American homes. Ironically, its partner in the rocket-for-hire venture is Boeing, the same company whose long-range bombers scared Nikita Khrushchev into founding OKB-1 to build the ICBM.
It’s a fitting end to the Sputnik saga to see the former ideological rivals now working together in the common pursuit of market share. That, too, is a big part of the new wireless age that the launch of the world’s first satellite made possible fifty years ago.
NOTES
Prologue
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1 Every second from now on meant 275 fewer pounds: See propellant use specifications at http://www.v2rocket.com/start/makeup/motor.html.
sixteen-ton Strabo crane: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/deployment/mobileoperations/html.
2 the nearby horse-track oval outside suburban Wassenaar: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/deployment/denhaag.html.
trajectory traced by a billowy white vapor trail: Dieter K. Huzel, Peenemünde to Canaveral (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 75.
producing a vein of jet exhaust gases at 4,802 degrees Fahrenheit: http://www.v2rocket.com/start/makeup/motor.html.
the second battery of the 485th Artillery Battalion: Frederick Ordway and Mitchell Sharpe, The Rocket Team (Burlington, Ontario: Apogee Books, 2003), p. 139.
body in a forty-five-degree inclination: Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 97.
3 The gimbaled spinning wheels, rotating at 2,000 revolutions