Tivo’d History.

Conner Kreide

Dr. Deborah Reese

Engl 1101

Dec. 3, 2013

Tivo’d History.

When I was around eleven years old or so I had the extreme privilege of going to the Kennedy Space Center with my Cub Scout group to spend the weekend. Now, as with any young lad, space is cool, and rockets, just as much. We were ecstatic about being there, we were special guests; behind the scene tours, astronaut speakers, the whole nine yards. One of the most exciting things though, was we got to spend the night there, and sleep underneath the Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V is the most massive space vehicle ever constructed by man. This behemoth of the cosmos was stored in a large hangar, and tilted over on its side in order to fit the 6.2 million pound, taller than the statue of liberty vehicle.(Dunbar) However, in all my time near it, and despite all the educational value of the trip, not once did I hear the name “Wernher Von Braun”. It was not until high school that I learned it was he who was the primary man behind that marvel of engineering, and not just the Saturn V but the man behind our moon program, and indeed the rock upon which our space program was built. Wernher Von Braun, who was a Nazi.

According to “The Age of Egocasting” we have in many ways become childish in our new technology. We are allowing it to sink into our society and warp the way we view and approach things. “We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.”(Rosen) As with our preferences the same thing is being held to our history. We simply overlook or omit parts which we do not find pleasing to our ego. We don’t like to accept that if it were not for the Nazi rocket program, ours, nor would of Russia’s would quite literally had never gotten off the ground.

 Fig 1. Braun and F1 Engines, NASA, Wernher Von Braun.   

 Marshal Space Flight Center 1969.   

Braun’s exact affiliation with the Nazi party though is debatable. He actually spent two weeks in jail because in his rocket research he was more interested in space travel than making machines of war.(cite) Not just a member of the Nazi party Braun was actually a member of the Schutzstaffel or SS, though before joining the SS the rocket program was already well under way and well funded before as Braun claims, he was forced to join. In a worst case scenario he was blinded by the glitz and glamor offered by Hitler, and like countless other Germans fell in line. In the end though he died a citizen          of the United States.                                                               

Under the Nazis Braun developed the Vengeance weapon two or V2 rocket. The rocket which was leaps and bounds ahead of its time as far as technology was a terrifying weapon successfully used many times against the allies. “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.” Braun is said to his colleagues after its first successful launch against London. With the United States approaching on the west and the Red army to the east, defeat was obvious. Braun orchestrated the escape of most his rocket team from their Nazi handlers and the red army into surrendering to the United States. Through a program called “operation paperclip” he and his team were smuggled out of war torn Germany and into the United States.

For the first half of the space race the United States lagged considerably behind Russia, who had captured their own Nazi rocket scientists. During these years Braun and his team were under the leash of the US army and developing the “Redstone” rocket series for them, which for all intensive purposes were modified V2s. It actually was a Redstone rocket that sent up our first satellite. It was during this time that Braun was chomping at the bit for funding to develop space exploration. To rally public support he wrote to scientific journals and even had a close partnership with Disney in which they created three films that aired on televisions. One of them, “Man in Space” accumulated 42 million viewers. In 1958 NASA was finally established and in 1960 Braun was put as the head of the Marshal Space Flight Center, which was tasked with building NASA’s rockets. In 1969 the historic Apollo 11 mission put two Americans on the moon and effectively won the space race, and the vehicle that brought them there, developed by Braun and his MFSC team.

TiVo, is one of the subjects discussed in “The Age of Egocasting” its brilliance is of course it gives you the ability to skip and fast forward through parts of a television program that you don’t like. Unfortunately true history is not a recorded television program that we can fast forward and skip parts. Our conditioning to only accept things we like goes far deeper than TiVo and switching through channels.  We have whited out the man behind one of America’s crowning achievements. Even though Von Braun did in the end reject his Nazi roots, became a full American citizen and then put us on the moon, that tiny blemish is all it takes for us to reject it and move on. A similar story can be said for other inventors such as Nicola tesla, who in our “TiVo’d history” creeps in the shadows of Thomas Edison, or is just out right never even mentioned.

           

Works Cited.

Dunbar, Brian. "What Was the Saturn V?" NASA. NASA, 17 Sept. 2010. Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

“Dr. Wernher von Braun First Center Director, July 1, 1960 - Jan. 27, 1970

" Marshal Space Flight Center history office. Marshall Space Flight Center, N.P. Web. 30 Nov 2013.

Piszkiewicz, Dennis. Wernher Von Braun: The Man Who Sold the Moon. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998. Print.

Rosen, Christine. “The Age of Egocasting” 2005. Word by Word, Armstrong edition. Ed. Nancy Remler. Boston, MA: Person Learning Solutions, 2012. 114-133. Print.

Wright, Mike. "The Disney-Von Braun Collaboration and Its Influence on Space Exploration" Marshal Space Flight Center history office. Marshall Space Flight Center, 1993. Web. 30 Nov 2013.