Along the same lines here is the first photo taken from space (1946, camera attached to a captured German V2 rocket) ...
Along the same lines here is the first photo taken from space (1946, camera attached to a captured German V2 rocket) ...
“I *told* you the Earth is flat.”
One of the minor “might have beens” is the mid-century German rocket program. There’s an anecdote regarding a wartime bon mot by Von Braun — someone asked him if he still planned to go the Moon, and he replied, of course, we just haven’t told der fuhrer. Had Hitler been different, he might have been satisfied with demonstrations of technological superiority, in which case, the Germans would have orbited someone by 1950, been on the Moon in 1960, and been on Mars sometime in the 1970s.
Von Braun saw the Moon as a step (and as practice) toward getting to Mars, his real goal. Mars was seen as the only place possible for Earthlings to colonize, even then, quite a precocious view. The F-1 engine was built to deliver Ed Teller’s big-assed H-bomb design, but after a much smaller design was successfully tested, the DoD dumped the F-1. Von Braun took his baby with him, eventually wound up with NACA, which was shortly afterward renamed NASA, all this during the Eisenhower administration. When JFK got into office, the US already had available the 1.5 million pound thrust engine that was indispensible for the lunar trips.
Von Braun’s Mars missions were going to use the Saturn V booster. Twelve launches would have been needed to assemble the mission in Earth orbit (the main reason, btw, that I always laughed and still do about the “Mars Direct” scenario, which claims a Mars mission can be done with a single launch using a “Saturn V or better”), and gravity would have been simulated by spinning the crew, in order to avoid the speculated (turns out true) degradation of bone density etc from long term exposure to microgravity.