[Dread Knot]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

He was a criminal that should have been executed, but we needed him so he got a get out of jail free card. It really bothers me our space program has such large amounts of blood on it's hands.

Well, there's the sad irony that our space program might have had more self-inflicted blood on our hands without von Braun. Almost all of those rockets that ignominously blew up on the pad in the early days of the space race were the non-von Braun models, such as the Thor, Atlas, Titan, Navaho, and the infamous Vanguard, which Eisenhower designated as the "civilian project' rocket that would get the US into space, satellite-wise.

On the other hand, von Braun's Redstone based Jupiter-C/Juno 1 vehicle rarely had problems. Even the Jupiter-based Juno II only had one failure attributable to its first stage, the others being due to the solid upper stages misfiring. Every one of the Saturns lifted off fine and performed within operational tolerances.

So, you have to give the devil his due. The man knew his rockets.

People often ask why von Braun didn't try to defect instead of going along with the Nazis and their atrocities.

He did, at the first possible occasion!

When the Allies were close enough, Wernher sent his brother secretly to contact the Allies and arrange for the rocket team to surrender at Oberammergau. In defiance of Nazi orders to destroy V-2 research, von Braun packed it up and trucked it across Germany to deliver to the Allies. Not the most ardent Nazi he. More of an opportunist.

Von Braun displayed a similar lack of loyalty to NASA. According to astronaut Ed Mitchell, once von Braun saw that NASA wasn't going to keep funding his vision, he left NASA and went to private industry.