Emojis, Nazis, and grandiose rocket scientists

Every rocket emoji has the same characteristics.?A streamlined bullet shape with tail fins.? But apart from science fiction and Tin Tin books, where have you ever seen a space rocket like that?? In fact, there has never been an actual space rocket that looked like that.? Except, perhaps, one…

I asked one of my classes recently if they’d ever heard of Wernher von Braun.? There was not a single glimmer of recognition across the room.? “You know...” I prompted, “The Nazi rocket scientist who was carefully extracted by the Americans at the end of World War Two to avoid prosecution for war crimes, and then went on to lead the development of the Saturn V rocket that sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon…? that guy.”? They were still none the wiser.? So I helped fill in the gaps.

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun grew up as a space geek, reading topical books on space travel as a kid, joining the German Society for Space Travel, and dreaming of building bigger and better rockets. He became particularly adept in the engineering of liquid-fuel missiles and achieved a doctorate based on research on liquid-propellant rocketry.? As Hitler prepared for war in the late 1930s von Braun was assigned to work at a secret laboratory at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, where he got to live out his dream of building big rockets. In 1937 he joined the Nazi Party and, after WWII started, he joined the SS.

Now building rockets is hard work, especially when they are actually missiles, because you have to build a lot of them to make it worthwhile.? So they forced over 60,000 prisoners from nearby concentration camps to build them. Within the last 18 months of the war, twenty thousand of them had died in miserable conditions. Even the official NASA biography recognises this: “Von Braun was well aware of the terrible conditions and was involved in decision-making about the use of slave labor.”

If you are generous, then at best von Braun was a morally ambiguous technical whizz whose passion for his work blinded him to the morality of how it was achieved.? A more balanced assessment might say he was a Nazi sympathiser who enthusiastically committed his time and energies towards his personal ambition of launching big rockets, and willingly used slave labour to achieve it.

Von Braun’s technical triumph at this time was the V2 rocket.? With its streamlined bullet shape and tail fins, the V2 echoed the sleek and dynamic design features of 1930s Art Deco and in June 1944 it became the first human made object to travel into space (by crossing the Kármán line at 100km (62 miles) the height at which orbital mechanics takes over from aerodynamics).

The take home message?? Know your history. Nazi-sympathising rocket scientists whose dreams of bigger and better space rockets overwhelm their moral compass is not new.

Remember that the next time you use a rocket emoji.