Marshall
Space Flight Center History Office
All About NASA
Everything About The V-2 Rocket
WOMAN IN THE MOON a Fritz Lang Film
About the Apollo Program
About Jules Verne
African
American Odyssey Exhibit
African American History
About Dred
Scott
National Archives
This project has been simmering for years, my curiosity peaked by a
1990 article in the Los Angeles Times about Arthur Rudolph, one-time
top NASA Saturn V Project
Manager, who was tainted, decades later by his Nazi past.
The idea of space travel was, a century ago, the stuff of science fiction—many
children grew up with the fantastic dreams of Jules Verne's From the Earth to
the Moon, and later, with the images of Fritz Lang's film "The Lady in the
Moon." Popular culture met science and politics in Germany between the World
Wars, when the need for new weapons found its answer in rocket science, and the
German rocket engineers found their patrons in the Third Reich. When the people
of the United States celebrated the fiery lift-off of Apollo VI on July 16, 1969,
few knew that that fire had been fueled by the bloody apocalypse of WWII, and
that the first miraculous steps of a man on the moon came on the backs of thousands
of innocent victims of the Holocaust. The German rocketeers [the team of
Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph and over 100 others who created the V-2 rocket]
were brought to the United States, against official US policy, through a secret
US Army operation—Project Paperclip—their dossiers whitewashed to
cover up Nazi collaboration and crimes. The German scientists and their families
lived and worked in the US—first in Fort Bliss, Texas, and later, in
Huntsville, Alabama [click here to view
photos]—became citizens, and were the heroes
of
our
Cold
War efforts for nearly forty years; they provided ballistic missile technology,
led
the US
space
program, landed astronauts on the moon, created Disney's Tomorrowland.
This story keeps opening up for me, in astonishing directions. After starting
research about the above events, I realized that Jules Verne wrote his influential
From the Earth to the Moon [published in 1865], in part as a response
to the social/political ramifications of the radical events of America’s Civil
War. This led me to consider what might have been going on in Huntsville,
Alabama in that same year, as the community was contending with serious fall
out from its legacy of slavery and the newly mandated Reconstruction. All
of which led me to ponder the bizarre convergence in that same location 100 years
later, of the German rocket scientists, the conflagrations of the Civil Rights
Movement, and President Kennedy’s deadline of sending a man to the moon
before the end of the decade. These strange juxtapositions are the starting
point for Apollo [Part 2]: Dark Side of the Moon, the beginning of
what I hope will evolve into a dense tapestry of human passion, brilliance
and brutality,
weaving together threads as diverse as: a boy with a rocket, Manifest Destiny,
George Wallace and Dred Scott, fever dreams, German scientists in the American
South, the ghosts of the Seminoles, the habit of gravity, the Cold War, NASA’s
astronauts, Disneyworld, the endless march to freedom, the silence of space…
