Another battlefront
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6919378
May 11th 2006
From Economist.com
THE 20th century was the epoch of big science, and, consequently, of
celebrity scientists. The biggest science programmes of all were the
space missions of the 1960s and 1970s, when America and the Soviet
Union competed to be the first to send a man to another world. "Space
Race"-which was published in Britain last September and comes out
in America this month-traces the history of that contest through the
eyes of Wernher von Braun, an aristocratic former Nazi working for the
Americans, and Sergei Korolev, the mysterious Soviet chief designer
whose name was hidden even from his own people by a paranoid and
suspicious state.
Both men shared a passion for manned space flight, but their
experiences under their respective governments were worlds apart. The
Americans spirited von Braun away from Germany as the war ended, and
suppressed records of his Nazi past. He was ultimately given an entire
department to run at the newly-formed NASA. The man whose rockets
(built in a vast underground slave-labour camp) had bombarded London,
and whose fantastic predictions included nuclear-powered space stations
and holidays to Mars, became a media star in an age of naive optimism
about the power of science. He wrote articles, gave speeches, presented
a Disney-produced documentary on the wonders of space travel and was
even the hero of a hilarious song by Tom Lehrer.
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