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Rockets and People
I need to write about Peenemünde from a historical standpoint. For that
reason I have singled out only the basic results of the work in Peenemünde. In so
doing, I have used “sources” that we found in Germany and information from
memoirs published later by individuals who participated directly in the work
in Peenemünde.
The inspection of Peenemünde in May and June 1945 showed that the actual
scope of work on rocket technology in Germany was far superior to what we
had imagined. We Soviet specialists needed to investigate the entire volume of
work that had been done in Germany in the field of rocket technology. But it
was just as important to obtain information on the history of these developments
and the methods used by German scientists and engineers to solve many difficult
problems, such as those involved with the development of long-range
guided ballistic missiles.
Before 1945, neither we, the Americans, nor the Brits had been able to develop
liquid-propellant rocket engines with a thrust greater than 1.5 metric tons.Those
that had been developed were not very reliable, had not gone into series production,
and were not used to develop any new type of weapon. By that time,
however, the Germans had successfully developed and mastered a liquid-propellant
rocket engine with a thrust of up to 27 metric tons—more than eighteen
times greater! What is more, they had produced these engines in large-scale series
production by the thousands! And the automatic guidance system! It was one
thing to fundamentally and theoretically show that for the given level of technology
it was possible to control a missile’s flight and consequently the engine mode
in flight at a range of 300 kilometers; it was a quite another thing to put this into
practice and bring the entire system up to a level suitable for acceptance as an
operational armament!
As a result of World War II, at least three new scientific and technical achievements
emerged, which to a great extent revolutionized previous ideas on strategy
and tactics for possible future wars.These achievements were automatically guided
missiles, radar technology, and nuclear weapons.The first two did not require the
discovery of any new laws of physics. Nuclear technology was another story. Its
development was spurred by the discovery of new laws of nature and new scientific
methods involving penetration into the atomic world and the nature of the
fundamental principles of matter.
These three new forces, like genies, were released from laboratories during
World War II. Historically, the obvious and undoubtedly objective fact that military
technology is the strongest stimulus for the development of a society’s industrial
power and the progress of civilization as a whole seems paradoxical, even
shocking.The fact that the foundation of modern cosmonautics was the scientific
and technical creativity of the military-industrial complex of the Soviet Union and
the United States has also been obvious for a long time.
What role did German scientists and Germany’s military-industrial complex
during World War II play in the future development of cosmonautics? We obtained
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