Posted on 01/13/2021 3:07:14 PM PST by blam
And it would be adding another primary target to the two you mentioned: NORAD & Space Delta 4 (formerly the 460th Space Wing)
Though I will concede that Huntsville is probably on someone’s ICBM target list, but probably for the 2nd round of missile launches.
By Shaila Dewan
Dec. 31, 2007
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. In 1950, this cotton market town in northern Alabama lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its mothballed arsenal. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man a crackpot, evidently who claimed humans could visit the moon.
Ultimately those German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit in January 1958 and putting astronauts on the moon in 1969. The crackpot, Wernher von Braun, was celebrated as a visionary.
Far less attention, though, has been given to the space program’s permanent transformation of Huntsville, now a city of 170,000 with one of the country’s highest concentrations of scientists and engineers. The area is full of high-tech giants like Siemens, LG and Boeing, and a new biotech center.
Rocket scientists, propulsion experts and military contractors have given the area per capita income levels above the national average and well above the rest of the state.
Huntsville residents regard their city as an oasis, as un-Alabaman as Alabama can be. But they acknowledge that the state’s backwater reputation is a hindrance to recruiting. Local boosters are hoping to use the 50th anniversary of Explorer I on Jan. 31 as a way to promote Huntsville as Rocket City, unveiling a new pavilion, housing a 363-foot Saturn V rocket, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a museum and popular tourist attraction.
Even the Germans, who had spent five years cloistered on an Army base near El Paso, knew beforehand of Alabama’s spotty “résumé,” as Konrad Dannenberg, who at 95 is one of the last surviving members of the original von Braun team, put it last week.
Image “We knew that the people here run around without shoes,” Dr. Dannenberg said, in a tone of deadpan gravity. “They make their money moonshining and that’s what they drink for breakfast, and supper. And so we, in a way, were a little bit disappointed that it was really not that bad.”
The residents were wary of the Germans as well. They knew that most of them had been members of the Nazi Party and that they had built the V-2 rocket for Hitler. But the charismatic von Braun accepted virtually every speaking invitation, winning over Rotarians and peanut farmers.
And the Germans tried hard to assimilate. Von Braun insisted that the scientists speak English if there was so much as a single American, even a janitor, within earshot, said Ernst Stuhlinger, 94, another surviving member of the team. Dr. Stuhlinger was one of many who settled on Monte Sano, the mountain overlooking the town, which reminded the Germans of home.
“People said, ‘If you had just been at war with these people, how can you be so accepting of them?’ ” recalled Loretta Spencer, the 70-year-old mayor of Huntsville, offering a visitor a homemade pecan cookie. “But I think we were just in awe.”
In school, the German children’s diligence posed a challenge. “I remember working real hard in physics class to beat Axel Roth, who later worked for NASA,” Ms. Spencer said. “I beat him by a point on the final exam, and I was really tickled by it.”
The Germans also needed thousands of Americans to staff the missile program. Many who answered the call were “rocket boys” like Homer H. Hickam Jr., author of the memoir by that name, who scavenged together his first rockets in a West Virginia mining town and now lives here. Others were young men from cotton-picking families who went to school on the G.I. Bill.
By the time Explorer I was launched, the residents of Huntsville had so thoroughly adopted the Germans that there was an impromptu celebration. Charles E. Wilson, the former secretary of defense whose severe curtailment of the Germans’ work was blamed by some as having allowed the Soviet Union to beat America to space with Sputnik, was burned in effigy.
And by the mid-1960s, von Braun had so mastered the local culture that when he wanted voters to approve a bond issue for the Space and Rocket Center, he persuaded Bear Bryant, the revered University of Alabama football coach, and Shug Jordan, the rival Auburn coach, to make a television commercial supporting the project.
Rocketry permeated Huntsville, where windows shook and dishes cracked each time the powerful propulsion engines were tested. Children built rockets powered by zinc powder and sulfur, and the mad-scientist-in-the-basement tradition still has a hold. Tim Pickens, a rocket designer who helped a private manned spacecraft win the $10 million X Prize in 2004, attached a 200-pound-thrust engine to a bicycle in his garage here.
City officials trying to capitalize on this kind of ingenuity are irritated that prominent scholars have chosen this moment to scrutinize the von Braun team’s Nazi ties.
A new biography by Michael J. Neufeld portrays von Braun as a man who made a Faustian bargain. Diane McWhorter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Birmingham native, is at work on a book on the space race that compares Nazi ideology to contemporaneous white supremacy in the South.
Most Huntsvillians concluded long ago that the Germans had been coerced into joining the party. And, though skeptical of claims that the scientists were thoroughly apolitical, Ms. McWhorter says Southerners might easily understand that membership in an organization is not necessarily the best indicator of sentiment.
“There were members of the White Citizens Council in the South who were probably less racist than people who weren’t members,” she said.
Residents point to the symphony and the Huntsville branch of the University of Alabama, both nurtured into being by the Germans, and say their enlightened views contributed to the fact that the town had the first integrated elementary school in the state. Dr. Von Braun himself was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan for hiring blacks, said Bob Ward, a Huntsville newsman and von Braun biographer.
Besides, Huntsville is a forward-looking place. The Nazi question “just doesn’t come up,” said Loren Traylor, a Chamber of Commerce vice president. “That was then, this is now.”
I agree. Huntsville is a better location. I work at Grissom and honestly, while the location is remote, there’s no way (given the county politics around here) that it would have worked. The Miami County Godfathers would have had a fit!
Enjoy the news.....Biden will cut the entire program.
Likely correct. Also, our new masters will need every dollar to pay for benefits to all the illegal aliens made new citizens, including the tide that will be pouring over the border.
The heads of the other service branches is in D.C. Move Space Command to the sticks makes it an adjunct of another branch, probably the Air Force.
...just wait...! Colorado Gov Polis and his husband will strongly petition an incoming gay=friendly PoS Biden administration to have this decision overturned....this is gonna be the wave of the future....wait for it.... jus’ sayin’ ....
Little backstory. There once was a very large contingent of Luftwaffe soldiers assigned to Redstone for training in missile logistics and support. There was also a large contingent at Fort Bliss Texas for operational training in missiles.
There were so many soldiers at these two locations that the Luftwaffe chartered two weekly flights carrying diplomats and soldiers. The plane would stop in DC, Redstone, and at Fort Bliss. One of the nice things was the German government would send German wines, beers, and food stuff to each location. Several pallets would be offloaded at each stop.
There was a “Soldatenstube” at Redstone and at Fort Bliss serving German meals. Since the food and liquor entered customs free, very few non-Germans could partake. In fact, the Commanding Officer at Redstone would be the only non-German invited to the Christmas dinner.
Now very few German soldiers study at Redstone and the Soldatenstube is only a memory.
The mentally ill homosexual from San Franfreako Colorado Governor Polis made it clear to the DoD that Colorado no longer welcomes the military.
I am a prior Space Command alum (1983) and one of the original space systems graduates. Colorado has been my home ever since, but I am looking to leave, and the military should be too.
Plus, don’t want to put them in an insecure blue state where there are lots of anti-Americans and commies.
I live about 50 miles from Huntsville
The bigger question is will the US Space Command survive the coming reallocation of tax dollars to social justice programs?
Huntsville is in the far right hand north west corner of Alabama. Near Chattanooga and near the 14th district of Georgia, Huntsville has got hills valleys, vegetation, rain, lakes, streams, and wildlife. It is a nice place to go for a walk in the woods.
Yup. I've read articles about Germans who visit relatives there and wind up immigrating there because they like the area so well.
Mine too. We spent several years in Huntsville (dad worked for Boeing) and then returned to Seattle. I loved Huntsville and still wish we had stayed!
I’ve been wondering about the same things.
It’s a great town. NASA Student Launch is there every year. Lots of great people.
My AE son went to the NASA Student Launch in Huntsville, so did I as an observer and proud mama. I loved Huntsville. Great place for the Space Force. Screw the Air Force and Colorado for thinking they had it in the bag.
Yeah, probably right. I’ve tried to put Polis and the “first gentleman” out of my mind, but every time I hear that phrase it makes my skin crawl.
Trumpet 1 wrote: “Huntsville is in the far right hand north west corner of Alabama.”
Check your map. HSV is pretty much on the centerline of the state about 20 miles south of the TN/AL border. HSV is about 80 miles east of the MS/AL border and 60 miles west of the GA/AL border.
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