Tearing von Braun and NASA a new a-hole.

Henry Spencer wrote:

Dead is dead. They are just as much a cost of the automobile as the
deaths you mention were costs of the V-2. And there are a whole lot
more of them.


For some reason I am now going to be stuck with this image of
Volkswagens descending out of the sky on London....

Pat

On a similar note, I have seen as a hypothetical presented in a
publication (I think it was 'The Race', but I'm not sure), that von
Braun was concentrating on liquid fueled missiles (undisputable). But
wouldn't it have been much more militarily effective had he concentrated
on something that could be launched quicker, like solid fuels. (open to
question).
In other words, was he trying to stall, in a non obvious fashion, the
military use of his missles? In order to answer this properly, one
needs to have knowledge of solid rocket fuel development at the time
(which I don't) and could a V-2 sized solid rocket fueled missile have
been constructed and flown by vB and his team in the same time frame as
the V-2 was.

Basically the author was insinuating that von Braun _was_ really
concerned with space flight as opposed to a militarily useful missile.

Pat Flannery wrote:


Grinlin Gibbons wrote:

Number manufactured: 6,240

Number launched: 3,590
Successes: 2,890 (81)
Failures: 700 (19)
In inventory: 2,100
Work in progress: 250
Expended in development: 300

Development program cost: US$ 2 billion
Development cost per launcher: US$ 350,512
Total manufacturing cost per launcher: US$ 43,750
Marginal cost, launchers 5000+: US$ 13,000 (Yes, 13K!)

These are actual figures for the first
mass-produced rocket vehicle, the V2
(A4)--fifty years ago. Prices are in US wartime dollars.

Total deaths related to V2

26,500 - Dora/Mittlewerk
2,754 - Britain
6,448 - Belgium

35,702 killed by V2 production and use. 6240 produced.

The REAL cost of a V2 - 5.72-deaths per
V2 (at least).

So when you view a video of a V2 launch, each one cost almost 6-lives.

A Challenger disaster with every launch. Think about it.




From an old posting of mine to sci.space.history:

"They managed to spend a fortune of the Nazi's money (around 2 & 1/2
billion dollars in U.S. wartime dollars; including 2
billion for the A-4 and it's predecessors development alone between
1931-45) on a weapon that, in use, killed a average of around 1 & 3/4's
person per missile.. from an old post of mine:

Out of curiosity, I looked up the facts and figures on casualties caused by
V-2's (or A-4's, for the purists) during W.W.II:
A total of approximately 3,170 V-2s were launched operationally at targets;
the vast majority at London, England and Antwerp, Belgium.
The V-2 attacks on England killed a total of 2,511 people.
The attacks on Belgium by both V-1's and V-2's killed a total of 6,448
people- assuming a breakdown of the type of weapons used to be the same as
the attacks on England, then around 44% of the deaths would be attributable
to V-2's; or around 2840 total.
If we include another, say, 200 deaths for other targets that came under
V-2
attack, we come up with a total of around 5,550 total fatalities or a
average of 1 and 3/4 killed per missile.
...if von Braun was a murdering terrorist, he was a rank amateur by
most standards.
(Figures are from V-Missiles of the Third Reich, by Dieter
Holsken, Monogram Aviation Publications,1994, ISBN 0-914144-42-1)

Your argument assumes that all the dead of Dora and Mittelwerk would
have survived the war if there were no V-2; the slave labor force was
also building V-1's, Junkers-Jumo piston aircraft engines, and HE-162
Volksjagers at Mittelwerk, and if the workers hadn't been building V-2s,
would they have been working on these other projects? In fact, the very
fact that they were seen as capable of doing work of some sort for the
Nazis probably saved them an immediate trip to the gas chamber, as
happened to everyone who was deemed unfit to do work on arrival at the
camps (many women- as well as young children, the elderly, the sick, and
the infirm) The only deaths that can definitely be credited to the V-2
are the ones inflicted on the receiving end of its trajectory (as well
as some upon the troops who operated it, and civilians that
malfunctioning ones fell on near the launch site). As a weapon the V-2
sucked. Even using your figures, we come to a figure of total dead of
9,202 for Britain and Belgium, plus whatever the malfunctions amounted
to (say 500) so taking 9,702 and dividing it by your total production
and launch figures we arrive at 1.6 deaths per V-2 produced; or 2.7
deaths per V-2 actually used- for a terror weapon it seems about as
efficient as a well-placed hand grenade. The tremendous amount of money
that was spent on them would probably have generated far more deaths if
it had been spent on other military weapons, or merely on thousands and
thousands more V-1s; which was a far more effective weapon from the cost
point of view- from http://www.strandlab.com/buzzbombs/
"Afterwards, the Allies acknowledged that the V-1 was a tactical
success. It was also a very cost-effective weapon:

From a strictly dollar point of view, the V-1 cost the Germans less
to build and to operate than it cost the Allies in damage and
defense. A wartime British study [concluded that] using the German
costs as unity . . . it cost the defenders 1.46 for damage and loss
of production, 1.88 for the bombing, .30 for fighter interception,
and .16 for static defenses, for a total ratio of 3.80:1 [in favor
of the Germans.]"

Mittelwerk production costs per V-1 were around 6,000 marks per
unit...so that 2 billion marks used on the V-2's would have built
around another 333,333 of them; even taking 1/2 that money and using
it for more launch sites as well as destruction of V-1's in
airstrikes before they were launched and you could have around
166,000 more V-1s heading toward Britain and Belguim- using the
total number of ground and air-launched V-1s used against Britain as
a guide- 10,492; and the total that reached Britain itself after
malfunctions, interceptions, and anti-aircraft fire- 5,822- we come
up with an overall success rate of around 45% of the flying bombs
launched successfully reaching enemy territory.
These resulted in a total of 6,184 killed in England, and a further
17,981 severely wounded; extrapolating from these figures we find a
average fatality rate of around .58 per V-1 launched, and a wounding
rate of 1.7 per same.
Taking this in combination with our earlier estimate of 166,000
extra V-1 launches by the nonexistence of the V-2 program, and we
end up with a total of around 96,280 more dead, and 282,200 severely
wounded by V-1 attack bringing our total V-weapon casualties to
around 100,000 killed and around 300,000 severely injured.
This contrasts sharply with the effects of the actual V-1/V-2
attacks which caused a total of 15,324 killed and 37,189 severely
injured between Britain and Belgium. If the money that went into V-2
design and construction was spent on V-1s instead, then there could
have been around 84,000 fewer people alive at the end of W.W. II.

Pat


--
Richard A. Hubbard (remove the nospam to actually mail me)
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary,
and those who don't"

Richard Hubbard wrote:

On a similar note, I have seen as a hypothetical presented in a
publication (I think it was 'The Race', but I'm not sure), that von
Braun was concentrating on liquid fueled missiles (undisputable). But
wouldn't it have been much more militarily effective had he
concentrated on something that could be launched quicker, like solid
fuels. (open to question).

In other words, was he trying to stall, in a non obvious fashion, the
military use of his missles? In order to answer this properly, one
needs to have knowledge of solid rocket fuel development at the time
(which I don't) and could a V-2 sized solid rocket fueled missile have
been constructed and flown by vB and his team in the same time frame
as the V-2 was.

Basically the author was insinuating that von Braun _was_ really
concerned with space flight as opposed to a militarily useful missile.

There is a old story about one of the Peenemunde team (I forget which
one) at a party with some of the U.S. Army's solid-fuel advocates where
he held up a martini, and told them that liquids, not solids, were the
answer; and that they were fools for not realizing that fact. Later he
returned to apologize, stating that once he was completely liquid fueled
by the martinis, the solids didn't seem so bad after all.
From what I've read, the Peenemunde team didn't like solids on
principle; they weren't technologically "sweet", they tended to have
lower ISPs, weren't throttleable, and frankly- just weren't as much fun
to design- this parallels the situation in Germany during the war, where
a long range solid-fueled rocket- the Rhinebote- had to pretty much be
snuck into production when nobody was looking.
von Braun wasn't adverse to weaponizing space- that space station of his
was going to be armed with both nuclear weapons...and cannons! (Sander
should stick those on it...one would hope they were recoilless, but on
the other hand there's a whole new way to change its orbit.)

Pat

In article ,
Richard Hubbard wrote:
wouldn't it have been much more militarily effective had he concentrated
on something that could be launched quicker, like solid fuels.

Bear in mind that solids, then, were very poorly developed -- performance
was poor and they were somewhat hazardous. They were problematic for a
long-range ballistic missile in particular, because there was no way to
cut them off when the guidance system said "that's it!". They did not
become really competitive for ballistic missiles until some major
technical advances in the late 1950s.

(And that was in the US, too. The Soviets took longer to get good solids
working; solid-fuel long-range missiles didn't appear in their forces
until near the end of the Cold War.)

In other words, was he trying to stall, in a non obvious fashion, the
military use of his missles?

I doubt that. I think he was pursuing what looked like the best approach
to spaceflight, and if that happened to be less than ideal for missiles,
well, that was unfortunate, but it remained his preferred approach, and
he'd been hired to pursue that, not to reassess the problem from scratch.

I don't think he was actively opposed to military use of his rockets. My
reading is that his attitude was some combination of fascination with the
technical problems regardless of the exact application (a view also seen
in many of the scientists on the Manhattan Project), and a belief that it
was his duty to support his country even though he might not agree with
all of its policies (the German Army -- his sponsors -- traditionally made
a big point of being apolitical).
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

(Henry Spencer) wrote:

I don't think he was actively opposed to military use of his rockets. My
reading is that his attitude was some combination of fascination with the
technical problems regardless of the exact application (a view also seen
in many of the scientists on the Manhattan Project), and a belief that it
was his duty to support his country even though he might not agree with
all of its policies (the German Army -- his sponsors -- traditionally made
a big point of being apolitical).

In the same vein, I'm re-reading "Project Orion" and the same issue,
and the same "go along" attitude seems to have been the rule there as
well.

D.
--
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