Monday, November 03, 2003
WERNER VON BRAUN ON TRIAL
Two recent items have criticized the so-called "von Braun Master Plan" -- the ideas presented to the American public by Werner von Braun in a series of articles in Colliers magazine in 1952, illustrated by Chesley Bonestell paintings (and a few years later, with the same pictures, in books co-authored by Willy Ley). Here's an article in today's Space Daily by Jeffrey Bell and here's a more technically detailed piece in Mark Wade's great site, Encyclopedia Astronautica on the subject.
For space enthusiasts of my generation, these items address one of the foundational documents of our approach to space development. The two items cited above are correct about one thing: the Colliers articles were hugely influential in forming the American public's attitude toward space exploration and development. The ideas and images they communicated were my first exposure to the romance and possible reality of the dream of creating a meaningful human presence off Earth, and they planted seeds in the minds and hearts of millions of people that bore the fruit of the Apollo program and, as the authors mentioned above correctly point out, also have ended up with the problems inherent in the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station as we have them now. And I don't disagree with the technical criticisms of von Braun's plan as it was proposed back in the early 1950s. The question is whether the underlying goals and basic over-all program of the Colliers articles are fundamentally flawed.
Bell answers this question in the affirmative, but he does it mainly by attacking the technical details of a plan developed over 50 years ago and five years before the first satellite was launched into orbit. The few comments he makes about the fundamental question -- whether we should be engaged in manned spaceflight at all -- are deeply flawed. Bell says the Solar System is a "less interesting place" than von Braun and Bonestell and Ley imagined. He's wrong, for reasons I don't have time to get into this morning. He also correctly states that the "foundational documents" of the manned space endeavor were premised on a misconception about the relative value of manned versus unmanned activity in space. About that, he's correct, but he jumps to the conclusion that this negates the basic value of the von Braun "Master Plan." Again, Bell is wrong, because his vision is far too narrow and short. Space development isn't about the immediate benefits that can accrue from things like GPS and weather sattelites. In the long run, space development is about making a sustainable and permanent settlement of the solar system.
I'll write more on this subject soon, but for now, I'm off to work.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:40 AM
