What if von Braun refused the nazi regime to design rockets?

[nyarlathotep]

<font color="yellow">Unmanned probes cannot found a colony.</font><br /><br />Well that would be news to the other 'von'. <br /><br />It's probably a good thing that von Braun was working on the V2. Every one of those remarkably useless bombs churned out used enough labor to keep a Panther off the front.

 

[nyarlathotep]

<font color="yellow">30 years isn't enough to make a difference</font><br /><br />Regrettably, with the exception of remote sensing and geosynchronous communications you're absolutely 100% right. Despite having the launcher technology for 50 years, no progress has been made either through technology or mass production on bringing costs down. <br /><br />I'm certain that comsats and a required launcher for them would have been built once transistors were commoditised. Anyone who had read Authur C Clarke's 1945 article would have realised how important they were, both militarily and commercially. What is interesting to contemplate is that maybe if these capabilities had been developed commercially with no input from the ICBM crowd we'd have Toyota and GM mass producing BDBs instead of the crap AtkOrbNorBLockMart makes now.

 

[themanwithoutapast]

<br />What if von Braun refused the nazi regime to design rockets? <br /><br />Most obviously -- he would have died in a Stalag. <br />------------<br />Why should that be? If he had not volunteered for rockets and moved his interests consciously to another topic, nothing would had happened to him at all (maybe he would have gotten drafted into the military, if he was not doing anything vital for the industry in Germany) - somebody else would have taken his place in the rocket division of secret military projects. It would be different, if he had refused to work on the V2 any further well in the production phase (1943 or 1944) - but even then nobody would have put him in a prison or KZ (by the way Stalags were just for POWs), unless he would have actively sabotaged the project.

 

[nyarlathotep]

<font color="yellow">Don't forget the Yugos?</font><br /><br />I thought I said no input from the ICBM crowd...