Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I am now motivated enough to dig into Von Braun’s biography in order to learn his true history. As I mentioned before, I have always admired him. I am also now reading the documentation regarding the development of the Saturn V and Apollo. That is quite a saga. It is perfectly clear that our space program would not have amounted to much without Von Braun.
“It is perfectly clear that our space program would not have amounted to much without Von Braun.”
Not necessarily in an alternate timeline. Wernher von Braun would never have amounted to much of anything had it not been for Robert Goddard. If Robert Goddard had succumbed to tuberculosis before 1912, Wernher von Braun and his team would not have had Robert Goddard’s liquid-fueled rocket patents and advice to save years of research in the development of the rocket engines. instead, Hitler would have canceled funding for Dornberger and von Braun long before the A-4 (V-2) could have made its first test flight.
Without Robert Goddard’s inventions in rocketry to provide a time-saving means of completing the A-4 (V-2) rockets, there would have been no A-4 (V-2) rockets to capture and no A-4 (V-2) rocket teams to supplant the already existing domestic rocketry research teams of the United States and Soviet Union. If the United States would then have funded its own domestic rocketry engineers, then the United States could still have created its own successful space program without Robert Goddard’s prior inventions and without the assistance of Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team, albeit much later in the historical timeline.
Without Robert Goddard’s inventions, the lack of captured German rockets and rocket engineers would have setback Soviet Russia’s rocketry and space programs by many years, unless their spies succeeded in stealing the American designs at early dates. In the absence of such Soviet Russian rocketry and the ICBM threats they posed, there likely would never have been a manned space race to the Moon with the Soviet Russians. Instead, there would have likely been a much slower paced development of manned space flight with the Soviet Russians prodding the American government to grudgingly fund responses to the Soviet Russian efforts.
Without Robert Goddard, Jack Parsons, and Wernher von Braun, and others, our historical manned space flight accomplishments would not have occurred when and how they did occur.
See the Wikipedia articles and other works about Robert Goddard and Jack Parsons, and note what Wernher von Braun had to say about them.