What is the point of going to another planet?
I'm afraid that I have a bit of a problem with the way things were done in the early days of the space race.
I have a little saying, that my grandmother told me just before she died in 1978
"If you erase the past just because it is uncomfortable, then you not only erase its villains but you also erase those who died fighting that past and those survivors who are left behind"
I understand the desire to beat the Russians to obtaining the technology.
But I will never understand why the US effectively erased what Wernher Von Braun was - an SS-Sturmbahnnfuhrer, along with all the others that were given free pass and passage who were active SS officers who were a part of the US Operation Paperclip.
The US Military who sought these people out, with the full knowledge of what they had done to those imprisoned at camps such as Dora-Nordhausen, they saw the evidence within the camps, they saw the suffering....and still they turned a blind eye to it for the sake of rocket technology that would eventually become the Apollo series.
I find it incredibly tragic that even now after all these years that no-one in high office within the US has apologised for the war crimes that were covered up and ignored for the sake of putting a man on the moon.
It's like the continued ignoring of the Wereth 11....11 young men, part of the 333rd Field Artillery who held onto Bastogne, waited for days for reinforcements that never arrived. Shielded by a Belgian family, the Langer's, when lost from their unit. Those 11 young men were eventually found thanks to a village neighbour ratting out to the SS. Those young men were caught by Panzer Commander Joachim Peiper, tortured and mutilated, left under fresh snowfall to die. The Langer family who tried to save them, found them and contacted the US Military who didn't want to know. It was the son, Matthias Langer, who finally placed a memorial to those 11 young men and wrote to each of their families to let them know where their relatives had died and how they died in 1944. Only in the last 10 years or so has the US Military finally acknowledged the Wereth 11. But their murders were never and have never been acknowledged as SS war crimes and there is no plan to do so. The 333rd were a black unit and their fight was one of the fiercest of the Battle of the Bulge, they shortened that battle with their bravery, sadly most of the men and those Wereth 11 have been virtually erased.....an inconvenient truth, just like Von Braun and his cohorts were an inconvenient truth that had to be airbrushed out of sight.
So as much as the space race and subsequent space exploration has been a technological marvel and will probably continue to be so, I cannot and will not forget what came beforehand and who was so heavily involved in getting into space and their inhumanity.
Sorry.
mars.nasa.gov
