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2. An Empire in Space: Europe and America as Science Fact "Always the goal." —Michael Flynn1 In the closing days of the Second World War, German rocket engineers and their technologies became one of the most coveted spoils of a defeated Third Reich. Led by Wernher von Braun and General Doctor Walter Dornberger, these were the rocket scientists and technicians who had designed and built the infamous flying bomb, the V-2 (Vergeltungswaffen Zwei, or Retaliatory Weapon Two).2 Shortly after the Allied victory, the German rocket team was shipped to the United States, where it was required to continue its wartime experiments. The arrival of the Germans on American soil was the necessary catalyst for postwar astrofuturism. Their presence brought together three national spaceflight movements—American, British, and German—that had been sundered by the war (significantly excluding that of the Soviet Union), enabling the collaboration that made the space age technically feasible in the West. Under the auspices of U.S. Army Ordinance at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, the German rocket team mated a V-2 with a small missile called the WAC Corporal and launched the result. On 24 February 1949, the rocket code-named "Bumper" reached a height of 250 miles in six and a half minutes. At that point, "the missile for all practical purposes was outside the earth's atmosphere ."3 The barrier to space had been broken.4 Thus the United States followed Germany in realizing the twenty-year-old dream of the rocket societies, and the official imagination endorsed the space frontier as an achievable reality. The rocket team had come to the United States under aWar Department program called "Project Paperclip." While many 50 CHAPTER 2 Americans thought that the Paperclip scientists should have been tried as war criminals, a few men in the Army and the War Department believed that the knowledge and expertise of these men were too valuable to waste. The terror that the "flying bomb" had created in London and its suburbs convinced them that this new technology could be an important factor in determining the postwar balance of power. Pragmatism overcame the moral scruples even of those who knew the conditions under which the V-2 had been produced. In his work on the compromises that the Allies made at the end of the war in the race to profit from German wartime research, Tom Bower notes that the conquering nations were fully aware that the Mittelbau, the underground rocket factory at Nordhausen, which was the first modern mass production facility for ballistic missiles, was supported by a concentration camp system and the most brutal kind of slave labor. The system increased production tremendously but at the cost of thousands of lives: At least twenty thousand men would die there before the end of the war. Working without power drills or mechanical excavators, the slaves were constantly threatened and beaten while they dug, hammered and heaved their pickaxes. Since there was scarcely any food or water and no sanitation or medical facilities, life expectancy rarely exceeded six months. During their daily tour through the tunnels, the Peenemunde scientists felt the extreme humidity,the chill gusts of air, the dusty atmosphere, and intense depression. Despite the constant arrival of new labor the number of workers never increased . On average, one hundredmen a day died of exhaustion, starvation, and disease, or were murdered by the SS guards, either on a whim or as punishment. . . . Replacements supplied by the SS from other concentration camps arrived on demand from [Arthur] Rudolph or Werner [sic] von Braun. Neither scientist was directly responsible for these conditions, but they accepted the situation created by the SS without demur.5 This record of rocket team complicity in Nazi war crimes was adroitly covered up by the U.S. Army and the War Department to avoid the public outcry that would have resulted from its broadcast.6 Despite the rhetoric of freedom, wealth, and equality that marked the space future vision both in its beginnings during the Weimar Republic and in its reformulation on American soil, the technology and organization required for movement into space were allied to what Dale Carter has called the "Oven State": the totalitarian technocracy of Nazi Germany, an ideology that found its most vivid expression in the extermination camps of Dachau and Auschwitz.7 In Carter's view, the Oven State was replaced after the war by the "Rocket State," which created an "incipient totalitarianism" in...

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