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Sputnik's Beep: The Bargain That Started the Space Race
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Space Race began not with Kennedy's speech but with a moral compromise — a Nazi SS officer, slave labor, and a U.S. government that looked the other way. From Sputnik's first beep in 1957 to Operation Paperclip, this is the origin story nobody wanted to tell.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's something that gets overlooked in almost every telling of the Apollo story. The rocket that carried Neil Armstrong to the Moon was designed by a man who had used slave labor to build weapons for Adolf Hitler.
Rewind to October fourth, nineteen fifty-seven. A small metal sphere, barely the size of a beach ball, rises from a launch pad in the Kazakhstan steppe and enters orbit.
In the spring of nineteen forty-five, as Allied forces closed in on Germany from both directions, von Braun made a calculation. He could surrender to the Soviets, who were closer and moving fast.
On the other side of that competition was a man whose name the world wasn't allowed to know. Sergei Korolev was the Soviet Union's chief designer of rockets and spacecraft.
The Soviet lead looked commanding in the early years. Sputnik in October nineteen fifty-seven.
Von Braun's role in what followed was central. He became director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville and chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the rocket that would actually carry Apollo to the Moon.
Between Mercury, the earliest American spaceflights, and Apollo, there was a program called Gemini. Ten crewed missions.
The ambition caught up with both programs in nineteen sixty-seven. On January twenty-seventh, at Cape Kennedy in Florida, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were running a pre-launch ground test inside the Apollo 1 command module.
The Apollo program at its peak employed around four hundred thousand people. Engineers, technicians, contractors, programmers.
In December nineteen sixty-eight, Apollo Eight flew to the Moon without landing. It was the first crewed spacecraft to reach lunar orbit.
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