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AdamSmith

The pianoforte

By AdamSmith, in The Beer Bar

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Buddy2 Experienced

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I was so lucky to addend college close to Boston when Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were relatively new on the scene. I saw Joan Baez perform in Boston's Symphony Hall in Early 1963. She told the audience "no bathroom" breaks (no exceptions).

 

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Buddy2 Experienced

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3 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Where? I think you have said and I apologize for not remembering.

Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

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Buddy2 Experienced

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10 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Ah! Recall your post now.

Had not known BC had more than one location.

Even I am a bit uncertain about the location. Fair because I had never been to Boston College until the first day classes.

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6 hours ago, Buddy2 said:

Even I am a bit uncertain about the location. Fair because I had never been to Boston College until the first day classes.'

You are right!

[i]'Sorry, Dave, my mind is going....'[/i]

^_^

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9 minutes ago, AdamSmith said:

Dave Bowman, the astronaut in the closing third of 2001: A Space Oddesy.

I have only seen that film once. Since the female astronaut from Framingham, Massachusetts was killed, I have zero interest in that subject. She was my brother's classmate.

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3 minutes ago, Buddy2 said:

I have only seen that film once. Since the female astronaut from Framingham, Massachusetts was killed, I have zero interest in that subject. She was my brother's classmate.

The movie scene quoted above is exactly about how the space authorities could in their hubris make exactly those kind of mistakes that led to many more than one death.

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On June 20, 1945, the U.S. Secretary of Stateapproved the transfer of von Braun and his specialists to the United States; however, this was not announced to the public until October 1, 1945.[59]

The first seven technicians arrived in the United States at New Castle Army Air Field, just south of Wilmington, Delaware, on September 20, 1945. They were then flown to Boston and taken by boat to the Army Intelligence Service post at Fort Strong in Boston Harbor. Later, with the exception of von Braun, the men were transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland to sort out the Peenemünde documents, enabling the scientists to continue their rocketry experiments.[citation needed]

Finally, von Braun and his remaining Peenemünde staff (see List of German rocket scientists in the United States) were transferred to their new home at Fort Bliss, a large Army installation just north of El Paso. Von Braun would later write he found it hard to develop a "genuine emotional attachment" to his new surroundings.[60] His chief design engineer Walther Reidel became the subject of a December 1946 article "German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken", exposing the presence of von Braun's team in the country and drawing criticism from Albert Einstein and John Dingell.[60] Requests to improve their living conditions such as laying linoleum over their cracked wood flooring were rejected.[60] Von Braun remarked, "at Peenemünde we had been coddled, here you were counting pennies".[60]Whereas von Braun had thousands of engineers who answered to him at Peenemünde, he was now subordinate to "pimply" 26-year-old Jim Hamill, an Army major who possessed only an undergraduate degree in engineering.[60] His loyal Germans still addressed him as "Herr Professor," but Hamill addressed him as "Wernher" and never responded to von Braun's request for more materials. Every proposal for new rocket ideas was dismissed.[60]

170px-Wernher_von_Braun_-_ABMA_Badge.jpg
Von Braun's badge at ABMA (1957)

While at Fort Bliss, they trained military, industrial, and university personnel in the intricacies of rockets and guided missiles. As part of the Hermes project, they helped refurbish, assemble, and launch a number of V-2s that had been shipped from Germany to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They also continued to study the future potential of rockets for military and research applications. Since they were not permitted to leave Fort Bliss without military escort, von Braun and his colleagues began to refer to themselves only half-jokingly as "PoPs" – "Prisoners of Peace".[61]

In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, von Braun and his team were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, his home for the next 20 years. Between 1952 and 1956,[62] von Braun led the Army's rocket development team at Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the Redstone rocket, which was used for the first live nuclear ballistic missile tests conducted by the United States. He personally witnessed this historic launch and detonation.[63] Work on the Redstone led to development of the first high-precision inertial guidance system on the Redstone rocket.[64]

As director of the Development Operations Division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, von Braun, with his team, then developed the Jupiter-C, a modified Redstone rocket.[65] The Jupiter-C successfully launched the West's first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. This event signaled the birth of America's space program.

Despite the work on the Redstone rocket, the 12 years from 1945 to 1957 were probably some of the most frustrating for von Braun and his colleagues. In the Soviet Union, Sergei Korolev and his team of scientists and engineers plowed ahead with several new rocket designs and the Sputnik program, while the American government was not very interested in von Braun's work or views and embarked only on a very modest rocket-building program. In the meantime, the press tended to dwell on von Braun's past as a member of the SS and the slave labor used to build his V-2 rockets.[citation needed]

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