Tag: Apollo Program

Apollo Program vs Manhattan Project

Whenever a need solving a complex scientific issue arises, calls often go out to start another Apollo/Manhattan Project. It is constructive to make a comparison of those two programs and determine if they are really a suitable model for today’s problems.

Cost

The media often cites the costs for these programs without accounting for inflation, otherwise known as nominal costs. That’s a serious mistake, especially when attempting to make a comparison to modern effort.

The Manhattan Project cost $1.9 billion in 1944 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, that is $27.5 billion in 2019. The average annual cost of the project is on par for annual spending on tobacco marketing. While most associate Los Alamos with the Manhattan Project, over 50% of the spending was for facilities at Oak Ridge, TN. This would include the gaseous diffusion plant to extract fissionable uranium.

The Apollo program cost $19.5 billion which equates to $150 billion in 2019. It was considerably more expensive to put a human on the Moon than to build the atomic bomb. What both programs had in common is spending spiked before their successful conclusion. Funding for the Manhattan Project peaked in 1944 and the Apollo program in 1966. Spending surged to build the industrial plants at Oak Ridge and Hanover for uranium enrichment and for the development of the Saturn V rocket. If a politician proposes a modern type project of this nature without increasing spending in the front end, it’s not a serious proposal.

Source: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf

A key difference between the two programs was spending for the Manhattan Project was secret while the Apollo program was public. In his autobiography, Man of the House, Tip O’Neill relates John McCormack’s story how then Speaker Sam Rayburn arranged funding for the atomic bomb:

“Einstein estimated the project would cost two billion dollars. Not surprisingly, the president was concerned about how to allocate that kind of money without alerting either the public or the press.

“Leave it to me,” said Sam Rayburn.

The next day, Sam called all the committee and subcommittee chairmen and told them to put an extra hundred million dollars in their budgets.”

No questions were asked or meetings held while those funds were siphoned off to build the atomic bomb. In contrast, President Eisenhower mandated NASA’s work and results to be public. This was to differentiate from the highly secretive Soviet program. Funding Apollo was often contentious as it had to compete with other priorities (Vietnam War/Great Society). Public approval for Apollo spending topped 50% only once, that during the first Moon landing.

Sustainability

The Manhattan Project and Apollo Program had varying success in sustaining their mission. The key components of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge remained in operation as national laboratories. No doubt, the Soviet success in 1947 with their own atomic bomb was the driving point. Many would argue the Manhattan Project was too sustainable. The original program built four atomic bombs. By the 1960’s, America had 30,000 nuclear warheads (the Soviets had 40,000 by the 1980’s). Since then, a series of treaties have caused a reduction of both stockpiles to a few thousand and atomic testing eliminated.

Apollo met a different fate. After the Moon landing was accomplished, President Nixon had no particular loyalty to the Kennedy inspired program. Once a recession hit in 1971, the final three missions (18-20) were cancelled. These were to be the major scientific phase of the program. Nixon directed NASA to work on the reusable Space Shuttle, thought to be a more economical means of space travel, but in reality, was more costly than expendable rockets. NASA has continued a robust planetary/observatory program, but its human program has not left Earth orbit since 1972.

Mars mission profile proposed in 1969 by Wernher von Braun. Apollo funding had peaked three years prior and would never return to that level. By the mid eighties, von Braun’s team brought to America under Operation Paperclip were under investigation for their V-2 efforts, especially the use of slave labor camps. Von Braun passed away in 1977. Credit: NASA.

Sustainability for both these programs were dependent upon political viability. During the Cold War, America felt the need to maintain nuclear superiority to the Soviet Union. While Americans generally wanted to stay ahead of the Soviet space program, this did not translate necessarily into human space exploration. NASA has far exceeded any other space agency in terms of planetary exploration, astrophysics, and Earth science. That gap is closing as developing nations such as China and India build their space programs.

Benefits

I’ll spare you the tales of NASA developing Velcro. Certainly private industry could have developed such a product. However, both programs contributed key innovations to American society.

As one might imagine, the Manhattan Project required solving complex mathematical problems. Given the urgency of the program, innovations were sought to speed up the process. John von Neumann expanded upon the IBM tabulating machines used at the project to build the first modern computer. The Apollo program began the miniaturization of the computer. While these computers were rudimentary compared to today, modern high tech has its roots in these programs.

The Manhattan Project kick started the field of nuclear medicine (used for imaging) and radiation treatments for cancer. The Apollo program contributed advancements for pacemakers, dialysis treatment, and development of CAT scan imaging. Both projects required the development of high-speed and powerful film imaging of the results of their work.

Nuclear bomb less than one millisecond after detonation. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Often overlooked, given the political nature of the Apollo program, is its scientific contributions. Prior to Apollo, there were three competing ideas how the Moon was formed – capture (Earth’s gravity captured Moon), accretion (Earth & Moon formed together), and fission (Moon split off from Earth during formation). Apollo proved all three incorrect. The generally accepted theory supported by evidence brought back by Apollo is the Moon was formed in the aftermath of a Mars sized planet colliding with Earth. The key point here is a scientific idea, no matter how impressive it may by, needs to be supported by evidence to be proven.

While spinoffs are secondary to the primary objective of these programs, as we can see, they often have powerful impacts on the economy and society in general.

Analogies

The most obvious analogy today would be addressing climate change. It’s not a perfect analogy. Climate change is much larger and more international in scope, but there are some lessons to be culled.

The urgency of climate change is similar to the Manhattan Project. If the Soviets had beaten the U.S. to the Moon, it would have been distressing but not an existential threat. However, solving climate change does not require secrecy and any innovations on that front, as with NASA work, should be in the public domain. A large scale program to combat climate change would entail the following:

An upfront surge in spending as similar to both the Manhattan Project and Apollo, the time frame to solve this problem is exceedingly short.

A realization that such an effort will rely on a mixture of government/university/private sector initiatives. The worst thing we could do is introduce ideology into the program i.e. must be an all government or private sector effort. All 3,000,000 parts of the Saturn V was designed and built by private contractors. DuPont produced plutonium and Kellex designed the uranium enrichment plants for the Manhattan project.

What should the government do and what should be left to the private sector?

Historically, government has performed best at providing an infrastructure the private sector can innovate upon. Infrastructure can take many forms including transportation, research centers, and the internet (developed by state universities and CERN). NASA, for one, provides intensive remote sensing of Earth to monitor the climate.

As challenging as the problem of climate change appears, it has one major advantage over the Manhattan Project and Apollo. There are market forces sustaining the advancements to reduce carbon emissions. The cost of renewable energy is now competitive with fossil fuels. Unlike space exploration, where Pan-Am flights to the Moon were once envisioned, market forces now favor investment and research into renewable energy.

As hard as our current president might try, he’ll not be able to cancel the fight against climate change as Nixon cancelled Apollo.

But, and this is a big but, it will be difficult to provide an accurate cost estimate. Any program that relies on the invention of new technology to bring to completion will have this problem. It’s not like repaving a road. Budget overruns of this nature often provoke political blowback. Here is where political leadership is required to keep moving a program forward.

If, as is often said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”, taking the proper lessons from history along with some flexibility will enable us to solve today’s most urgent problems. Things looked bleak in 1941 and 1960, but a strong effort and resolve overcame the odds.

  • Image atop post – left: Trinity Test, credit: Department of Energy, right: launch of Apollo 11, credit: NASA.

Equality and Space Exploration

As Apollo 11 sat on the launch pad, ready to complete what is arguably the most impressive technical achievement in history, a group of protesters marched towards Cape Kennedy.  Had he not been assassinated a year earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. would have led the march.  In his place was his best friend, Ralph Abernathy, who took over King’s role as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  As Abernathy put it, the protest was not against the Apollo program per se, but to “protest America’s inability to choose human priorities.” As we live in a democracy, proponents of space exploration should be prepared to answer the question, how does the space program benefit the poor and the general public?

Ralph Abernathy (far left) along with Martin Luther King, Jr lead Selma March for the Right to Vote, Abernathy’s children are front and center, 1965. Credit: Abernathy Family Photos/Wiki Commons

These thoughts came back to me while watching I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary on James Baldwin.  There is a tendency to think of the 1950’s and 60’s as when America was great.  Certainly, the economy was booming and middle class wages were rising, but as the documentary detailed, America was suffering from terrible social strife.  Progress was made legislatively on civil rights, but there were race riots in the cities claiming scores of lives along with a general spike in violent crime.  It was against this backdrop that the Apollo program existed.

Aftermath of 1968 Washington, DC riot. Warren K. Leffler/Library of Congress

There is the standard argument that the funds spent on the space program are minuscule compared to the overall federal budget.  And that is true, NASA’s spending is about 0.5% of the budget and peaked during the Apollo era at 5%.  Current spending on NASA comes out to $60 per person per year.  So is NASA just a highly publicized target for protest?  I think we have to look at the problem in a different light.  That being a policy of resource/education deprivation certain portions of the American population have endured in our history.

Resource deprivation is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.  If people are struggling to survive on a day-to-day basis, it makes it more difficult to sustain political resistance.  The history of African-Americans is certainly one of life under authoritarianism, from slavery to Jim Crow era lynchings and segregation.  And while significant improvements on that front have been made the past few decades, African-Americans continue to experience the impact of historical resource deprivation in terms of household wealth.

A key historical component of segregation was job discrimination.  During its early years, NASA ranked at the bottom of all federal agencies when it came to minority hiring.  While the book and subsequent movie, aptly named Hidden Figures, reveals crucial contributions to the Apollo program by African-Americans, the public face of NASA, the astronauts and mission control, were all white.  It was this facade that led Gil Scott-Heron to record Whitey on the Moon.  

Kennedy Space Center Launch Control, July 16, 1969. Credit: NASA.

So where do we go with this?  NASA has improved the diversity of its workforce greatly.  Kennedy Space Center employees are currently 27% minority.  While that helps those employed by NASA, what about Americans who live in poverty?  If one is segregated from the space program, you have no reason to support it, but that is true of any endeavor.  It’s no different than building a shopping mall without access to public transit, or a museum, or schools that are inaccessible to minorities.  The key to long-term sustainability is to integrate the benefits of the space program to all corners of society.

ISS Flight Control Team, Credit: NASA

The Apollo program lacked this sustainability.  Once the political aim of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon was achieved, the Apollo program was cancelled during the recession of the early 1970’s.  Lost was the science phase of the program – Apollo missions 18-20.  In fact, support for the Apollo program among the American public was tepid.  The only time more than half the public approved expenditures on Apollo was briefly in 1969 during the first Moon landing.  And even then, approval was only 53 percent.  The key to changing this is to turn space exploration from a “spectator sport” to one the public can actively participate in.

One obvious way of achieving this is integrating NASA research in K-12 education.  The amounts of data pouring in from NASA missions often require the efforts of citizen science to sort through it all.  Such an effort also requires educator training since many teachers, especially in high-need districts, teach outside their specialty.  And this effort should seek to aggressively reach out to the districts highest in need.  If successful, a public actively engaged in space exploration will tend to be more supportive of it.  Is exploring space worth this time and effort?

Perhaps the most important aspect of space exploration is understanding how the Earth fits in the universe.  Right now, there are no other planets where humanity can commence a mass migration.  Colonizing Mars, while feasible, is much more difficult than living in Antarctica, where only a few dozen scientists live at any given time.  We may discover Earth-like planets around other stars, but traveling to them as seen in Star Trek or Star Wars will not occur in our lifetimes, if at all.  Understanding this, and the fragile protections Earth offers humanity from a universe largely hostile to life, underscores the urgency in solving key environmental issues such as climate change.

Astronomy is among the most ubiquitous of the sciences.  Across all the continents and spanning throughout history, civilizations have sought out answers to what lies in the sky above them.  Nations that have been economically and socially healthy have been ones who have made the greatest advancements in astronomy.  Recently, the Trump administration has floated ambitious plans to return to the Moon by 2020.  By nature, space enthusiasts have jumped on the bandwagon.  However, as history has shown, if the United States also embarks on a program of resource deprivation such as repealing ACA, cutting Medicare, and turning education over to for-profit interests, public support for space exploration spending will not only be weak, but hostile.  The protest led by Ralph Abernathy in 1968 will look like a Sunday picnic by comparison.

During the Apollo program, it was often suggested that the management methods of the space program could be transferred towards solving poverty.  The space program cannot solve poverty, nor should it claim to be capable of that.  However, the space program can play a partnership role with the rest of the government and private entities toward that goal.  If we really want a sustained effort to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, it will have to be within an overall framework of a civilization that values inclusiveness and equality.  As Ralph Abernathy stated after watching the launch of Apollo 11:

“This is really holy ground.  And it will be more holy once we feed the hungry, care for the sick, and provide for those who do not have houses.”

*Image atop post is Apollo 11 on the launchpad during the early morning hours of July 16, 1969.  Credit:  NASA.

Where Apollo Landed on the Moon

During the Apollo era, I remember gazing at the Moon to find the areas where astronauts were exploring at the time.  Even with the most powerful telescopes, we are unable to detect the flags and equipment left behind, but it still is an interesting challenge to pick out these spots and not a bad way to learn about the Moon as well.  Recently, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been able to image these landing spots and made some discoveries that point to some other interesting potential landing regions should we return.

Apollo landing sites. Credit: Soerfm/Wiki Commons

The Moon is divided into two types of terrain, the highlands which are the bright regions and the maria which are the darker areas.  The highlands are very old, about 4-4.5 billion years and thus, heavily cratered.  This makes the highlands geologically rich but challenging to land on.  The maria are younger and thus easier to make a landing attempt as the terrain is smoother.  The maria were formed 3-3.5 billion years ago when large impacts flooded basins with lava eventually to solidify into the dark, iron rich basaltic surfaces we see today.  Maria is derived from the Latin word for seas which ancient astronomers thought these dark areas were.  Of course, there are no large bodies water to be found in the maria.  Like the first Apollo landings, a return to the Moon will likely begin in the maria and expand outward into more challenging landing zones.

Apollo 11

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent 21.5 hours on the lunar surface on the Sea of Tranquility.  Just before the famous Christmas Eve reading of Genesis by the Apollo 8 crew, William Anders noted the Sea of Tranquility was selected as a future landing site in order to preclude dodging mountains.  While there were not any mountains to dodge, there were several large boulders causing Neil Armstrong to take manual control of the lunar module, eventually finding a safe landing spot with 25 seconds of fuel to spare.  Apollo 11 returned 22 kg (48 lbs) of samples back to Earth.  As would be expected from landing in a mare region, the rocks were mostly basalt created from lava when the region formed.  There were also breccias which are smaller fragmented rocks fused together over time.

Apollo 11 landing site from 15 miles above the lunar surface. The foot trail to the crater right center is 50 m (164 ft) and was furthest Armstrong and Aldrin ventured from the lunar module. Credit: NASA.

Apollo 12

Launched during a rainstorm, the crew of Apollo 12 had to experience the adventure of getting hit by lightning before reaching orbit and proceeding to the Moon.  Like Apollo 11, this mission landed in a mare region.  The Ocean of Storms (or Oceanus Procellarum in Latin) was the landing site of Surveyor 3 in 1967.  NASA wanted to aim for a precise landing near Surveyor 3 and examine samples in this region which appeared younger than the Sea of Tranquility.  Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean made two excursions on the lunar surface reaching half a mile away from the lunar module.  The samples were mostly basalt and, as expected, were 500 million years younger than the Sea of Tranquility establishing a range for lunar volcanic activity.  The crew also visited the Surveyor 3 and retrieved its television camera which is currently on display at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

Pete Conrad checks out Surveyor 3 with lunar module 600 feet away in the background. Credit: NASA.

Apollo 14

After the Apollo 13 landing was aborted due to an explosion in a service module oxygen tank, its intended landing site in the Fra Mauro formation was slated for the Apollo 14 mission.  This was the first landing to occur in the lunar highlands.  This region contains rocks ejected by the formation of the Imbrium basin and it was hoped to capture samples that originated deep under the lunar surface.  The plan was also to capture samples from the nearby Cone Crater but the rugged terrain prevented the astronauts from reaching the rim.  Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell collected almost 42 kg (92 lbs) of rock samples most of which were breccia formed by rocks fragmented by the impact event.  The crew did collect some basalts which clocked in at 4-4.3 billion years old, significantly older than the earlier basalts collected.  Apollo 14 also had perhaps the most humorous event of the program with Alan Shepard’s attempt to play golf on the Moon.

Apollo 15

Hadley Rille from space with circle denoting Apollo 15 landing site. Credit: NASA

Apollo 15 began the J-series missions for the program.  These missions were more ambitious with longer duration stays and with the lunar rover, the ability to travel longer distances from the lunar module.  Apollo 15 was the first landing to stray away from the equatorial region.  David Scott and James Irwin spent some 18 hours exploring the lunar surface and traveled 28 km (17 miles-compared to 2 miles on foot for Apollo 14) on the rover.  A major target was the Hadley Rille.  Rilles are sinuous features on the Moon thought to be ancient lava tubes whose ceilings have since collapsed.  Indeed, the rocks returned from this region were basaltic in nature.  By the time Apollo 15 landed on the Moon, the final three missions (Apollo 18-20) were cancelled due to budget cuts, meaning there were only two trips to the Moon left for the program.

The 300 meter (1,000 feet) deep Hadley Rille from the lunar surface. Credit: NASA.

Apollo 16

This mission was specifically designed to bring back samples from the highlands.  Landing in the Descartes formation, Apollo 16 would return 96 kg (211 lbs) of Moon rocks that would fundamentally alter our understanding of the highlands.  Previously thought to be of volcanic nature, the sample contained very few basalt rocks.  Instead, the samples were breccia in nature.  Rocks on the Moon are fragmented when impacts occur.  These fragmented rocks are then fused together to form breccia rocks by the heat caused by subsequent impacts.  The age of the highland are 4.5 billion years old.  This dates back to the origin of the Moon as it cooled from a molten to a solid state.

Charlie Duke takes a sample of permanently shadowed soil next to the large boulder named, appropriately enough, Shadow Rock. Credit: NASA

Apollo 17

As this was the final Apollo mission, a sense of urgency was placed on obtaining a high scientific yield.  At one point, a landing on the far side was considered but rejected as it would require the additional cost of a communication satellite.  The far side is often confused as the dark side of the Moon.  However, during the new Moon phase the far side is facing the Sun and experiences daylight.  The far side differs from the near side as it is mostly highlands and has very little maria regions as can be seen below.

Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

The site selected was Taurus-Littrow Valley, a very geologically diverse region that required a precision landing.  For this mission, Harrison Schmitt was moved up from the cancelled Apollo 18 mission to become the first astronaut-scientist.  Three days after the only night launch of the Apollo program, America made its final Moon landing.  Three excursions extending 25 km (15 miles) brought back a haul of 111 kg (245 lbs) of samples including highland rocks ranging from 4.2-4.5 billion years old, basaltic rocks from the valley floor indicating volcanic activity about 3.7 billion years ago, and ejecta from the Tycho crater that was 100 million years old.  By lunar standards, the Tycho crater is a relatively young feature even though dinosaurs were walking on Earth when created.

Apollo 17 lunar rover at the edge of Shorty Crater. Near the rim there is orange soil that is titanium rich pyroclastic glass originated from 10 meters below the surface but was ejected during the impact event. Credit: NASA.

Lunar Interlude

The scientific phase of the Apollo program, which was to be 18-20, was cancelled by President Nixon as the economy began to experience its first bout of both high inflation and unemployment that would plagued the economy during the 1970’s.  Two of the unused Saturn V’s are on display at the Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers.  NASA began to develop the space shuttle and its planetary exploration program.  The public lost interest in lunar exploration as there was a sense of been there, done that.  However, the lunar surface covers an area 38 million square km (14.6 million square miles), about four times the surface area of the United States.  As NASA began to recommence unmanned lunar exploration in the 1990’s, the Moon began to offer some surprises.

Lunar exploration was started again in 1994 with the Clementine mission that globally mapped the Moon, in particular, the 15 km (9 mile) deep South Pole-Aitken Basin.  This was followed by the Lunar Prospector in 1998.  The Moon had been thought to be completely water free but the Lunar Prospector detected the presence of 300 million tons of water mixed in the soil at both polar regions.  How could water exist on the Moon?  The Moon’s axis is only tilted 1.5 degrees.  This means the Sun in these regions can only reach 1.5 degrees above the horizon, roughly the same as the Sun about ten minutes after sunrise in the mid-latitudes on Earth.  Hence, large craters remain in permanent shadow so that any water there will not evaporate into space.

Blue indicates regions on Moon where water may exist. Credit: NASA.

However, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched in 2009, discovered the presence of hydrogen beyond shadowed areas of the Moon.  The water could have been delivered to the Moon very early in its history via comets.  It is also thought the solar wind, which carries hydrogen, could interact with oxygen embedded in silicates on the surface to form water.  To be sure, we’re not talking lakes or even underground springs here.  The water amounts to about 45 parts per million, but given the cost to lift material from Earth into space (about $10,000 per ounce), any long-term settlement on the Moon will require the use of raw material situated there.  This gives some promise that the Moon could be used as a base to colonize space.

Above – LRO’s high-resolution tour of the Moon

NASA is currently developing the Orion crew module along with the heavy lift Space Launch System which will make an unmanned test run past the Moon in 2018.  The ultimate goal of this program is to land humans on Mars although a lunar program to test mission systems beforehand is not out of the question.  Going to the Moon is only a three-day hop compared to seven months for Mars.  Using the Moon as a testbed could make sense before making the leap to Mars.  It is often argued that unmanned missions are less expensive, and less hazardous than crewed spaceflight.  However, humanity is hardwired to explore and expand its presence.  That is how we expanded beyond our origins on the African continent across the oceans to all corners of the Earth.  Hopefully, in the near future, children will once again gaze at the Moon and ponder the about the people exploring our nearest celestial neighbor.

Science and Authoritarianism

With authoritarianism making headway in both Europe and America, it might be instructive to take a look back at what has historically happened to scientists and their supporting institutions when democracy wanes.  Here, I’ll take a look at Nazi Germany.  This might tempt some to invoke Godwin’s law as this is the extreme case study.  However, the Freedom Party of Austria has its roots in the Nazi party while Greece’s Golden Dawn party employs an altered swastika for its emblem inviting the comparison.  In America, the rise of Donald Trump trends more towards the celebrity cult/buffoonery of Gabriele d’Annunzio/Benito Mussolini, but the same can not be said of his most strident Twitter followers.  We’ll focus on the three most prominent German scientists of the era, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Wernher von Braun.

The Refugee

Over a decade before Hitler rose to power, Albert Einstein became the most famous scientist in the world during 1919 when the Eddington expedition provided experimental confirmation of general relativity.  Einstein’s troubles in Germany started only a couple of years later as Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, Nobel Prize winners in their own right, began to wage an anti-Semitic campaign against Einstein.  Lenard was a fine experimental physicist, but had been left behind in the modern physics revolution.  Stark also had difficulty comprehending the mathematics of the new physics.  Unable to critique relativity on its merits, both referred to modern theoretical physics as “Jewish science” and eventually espoused what was referred to as Deutsche Physik or Aryan Physics.  This politicization of science discarded modern physics and was intended to ride the wave of Nazi power.

Events in Germany came to a head as Hitler became Chancellor in January of 1933.  Shortly afterwards, Jews were forbidden to hold university or research positions.  Einstein had been in Belgium during early 1933 with the intention of returning to Germany.  However, as the situation deteriorated (Einstein’s house had been raided and sailboat confiscated), Einstein appeared at the German consulate and renounced his German citizenship (Einstein was still a Swiss citizen) and resigned his position at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the same academy where he announced his final general relativity theory in 1916.  During the summer of 1933, while still in Belgium, word was put out that a $5,000 bounty had been placed on Einstein’s life.

On October 3rd, four days before he left Europe never to return, Einstein gave a speech at the Royal Albert Hall.

During the speech, Einstein asked, “How can we save mankind and its spiritual acquisitions of which we are the heirs? How can we save Europe from a new disaster?”  The eventual answer, of course, was at a cost of millions of lives.

After arriving in America, Einstein took up a job offer at Princeton where he had remained until his death in 1955.  Einstein worked to get other unemployed German Jewish physicists jobs in America.  In all, over a thousand Jewish scientists relocated to America including  several Nobel prize winners.  This represented a significant shift in intellectual and innovative resources from Europe to America.  In 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning about the potential for Nazi Germany to produce an atomic bomb.  Many top refugee scientists worked on the Manhattan Project, whose final result would have been used against Germany had it not surrendered a couple months before the first atomic test.

The essential lesson here is that Einstein’s enormous talent did not spare him from Nazi persecution.  Purging or banning an ethnic group, besides the obvious ethical considerations, results in an intellectual drain.  Segregating an ethnic group from educational resources presents a loss of potential economic growth, which is why ideologues need to resort to ethnic stereotyping to deflect attention from the negative by-products of their policies.  Einstein, to his last days, spoke out for civil rights, lectured at black colleges, and was rewarded for his efforts with an 1,800 page FBI file.

As a pacifist, Einstein deeply regretted the letter that started the Manhattan Project.  As a scientist, to this day, his work has held up to every rigorous test experimental physicists have thrown up against it.  Relativity theory has provided us with the Big Bang, black holes, time dilation, and gravitational waves.  Einstein will be long remembered while those who chose the expedient path of supporting Nazism have had their scientific legacy tarnished greatly.  Not everyone in the German scientific establishment jumped aboard the Nazi bandwagon, some tried to mitigate the effects of Nazism by working within the system.

The Statesman

When Hitler ascended to power, Max Planck was president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.  Planck had revolutionized physics in 1900 by discovering energy was emitted in discrete packages dubbed quanta.  This would kick-start the quantum mechanics breakthroughs in the decades to follow.  Planck was among the first to recognize the significance of Einstein’s work in 1905 on special relativity, and as editor of the journal Annalen der Physik, published Einstein’s work.  It was Planck, as dean of Berlin University, who opened up a professorship for Einstein in 1913.  It was here that Einstein finished up his work on general relativity.

Max Planck. Credit: Bain News Service/Library of Congress

Max Planck was born in 1858 and his life arced with Germany’s rise from a patchwork of unorganized states to unification as a single nation in 1871, eventually to  rival the British Empire as a European power.  Conservative in temperament, Planck was inclined to be apolitical publicly.  However, Planck was a firm believer in advancing German science and loyalty to the German state.  In May 1933, as Einstein was severing his ties to Germany, Planck announced at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society annual meeting that:

“The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of the Sciences begs leaves to the tender reverential greetings to the Chancellor and its solemn pledge that German science is also ready to cooperate joyously in the reconstruction of the new national state.” 

In reality, Planck thought the Nazi party would moderate its views once in power (sound familiar?) and personally endeavored to continue the high standard of German research.  That did not happen, of course.  Planck met with Hitler personally in 1933 hoping to moderate his policy to stem the exodus of Jewish scientists from Germany.  The meeting ended with a Hitler rant that science would have to suffer.  Not surprising, as that is how discussions with hopeless ideologues tend to go.  At the annual Kaiser Wilhelm Society meeting in 1934, Planck noted while the society was devoted to science in service of the fatherland, pure research was suffering as a result of Nazi policies.  By 1935, Planck openly defied Hitler and attended the funeral service for Fritz Haber, who had been in exile from Germany.

It is difficult to maintain a functional operation when the overall organization is dysfunctional.  Eventually the dam breaks, and the dysfunctionalty takes control.  Planck in 1933 was also playing the role of the extreme centrist, blaming both Nazi and Jewish cultures equally for the situation in Germany.  In this one can see the danger in not recognizing an asymmetric authoritarian movement.  By 1936, Planck had openly stated that intelligence counts more in science than race.  But despite Planck’s efforts, the purging of highly talented Jewish scientists had been complete.  In 1937, Planck retired as president of the society, but not without offering the parting shot that scientific work required opposition to prove its merit, something Nazi supported science would not permit.

Planck’s experience offers the cautionary tale that an authoritative movement must be defeated before it obtains the keys to governance.  There was no reasoning to be had with Hitler in 1933 and access to power offered no motivation for Nazis to moderate their policies towards Jews.  By the end of World War II, Planck’s Berlin house had been destroyed in an Allied air raid, and he lost his son who was put to death for his participation in the plot to kill Hitler.  Planck had previously lost another son in World War I during the battle of Verdun.

Eight days after the surrender of Germany in 1945, at the age of 87, Planck resumed his role as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.  After Planck had passed away in 1947, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed the Max Planck Institute.  Under a democratic Germany, the institute has produced 18 Nobel prize winners and over 13,000 scientific publications annually.  ESA’s Planck mission measured the cosmic microwave background radiation – the remnants of the Big Bang.  The spectrum of this radiation is that of a blackbody, the same type Planck studied to determine that energy is emitted in packages.  Blackbody spectra are emitted by objects in a hot, dense state, meaning that was the state of the universe when it was 380,000 years old.  Planck’s legacy has enabled us to understand the nature of the electron and the origins of the universe.

In 2007, the Max Planck Institute completed a ten-year study on the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society during Hitler’s reign.  The report acknowledged, especially after Planck’s departure in 1937, unethical scientific research during that period.  It was not just party hacks involved in this behavior, some of the most talented scientists engaged in projects that degraded their reputations.

The Opportunist

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface.  It was the culmination of a decade’s worth of work and $150 billion (2016 dollars) to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon.  At the head of the Saturn V design team was Wernher von Braun, who was director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.  During the post World War II era, von Braun was the leading public advocate of space exploration.  In many ways, von Braun was the Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson of his era.  Unlike Sagan or deGrasse Tyson, von Braun’s reputation originated on the backs of slave labor.

In some regards, von Braun was similar to Planck in that he was not a Nazi ideologue.  He was loyal to Germany as a nation, but his main focus, obsession really, was space exploration and rocketry.  His childhood dream was to go to Mars, but as Hitler rose to power, only military rocket research was permitted.  During the early 1930’s, von Braun received a government research grant that permitted him to complete his PhD ahead of schedule.  Unlike Planck, he joined the Nazi party in 1937 to advance his career.

Wernher von Braun (in civilian cloths) at the Peenemünde Army Research Center where the V-2 was developed. March 21, 1941. Credit: Wiki Commons/German Federal Archives.

During World War II, von Braun headed up the German V-2 program.  While the V-2 killed 9,000 in its attacks, some 12,000 slave laborers were killed in the V-2 Mittelwerk production plant.  The facility was adjacent to the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp which supplied the labor.  While von Braun was not stationed near the plant, he did visit it and was aware of the deaths at the plant.  The V-2 program was not enough to stave off the eventual defeat of Germany in 1945.  Von Braun planned to escape to America as he felt that would provide him the best opportunity to advance his career.  Along with about 1,600 other scientists and engineers, von Braun was shepherded to America as valuable assets for the upcoming Cold War against the Soviet Union in a program code named Operation Paperclip.

Von Braun became famous to the American public during the 1950’s.  In 1952, von Braun played a key role in a influential series of articles in Collier’s magazine.  These articles presented to the public a peek at how future space missions to the Moon and Mars as well as a space station might look like.  In 1955, von Braun started work on a series of television programs for Disney promoting space exploration.  A sample of which is below:

Von Braun was a true visionary of space exploration.  It is difficult to reconcile a man who worked for both Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney.  My first lesson on space exploration was an article written by von Braun for the 1969 World Book Encyclopedia.  When NASA was founded in 1958, it got to choose the pick of the litter from the existing military rocket programs, and that was von Braun’s army team.  The rest is history and cemented von Braun as the face of America’s space program.

Von Braun passed away in 1977, about a decade before Operation Paperclip was investigated by the Justice Department.  While von Braun’s work on the V-2 project was common knowledge, his membership in the SS was not well known to the public until 1985.  Arthur Rudolph, whose contributions were crucial to the development of the Saturn V, was also the operations manager at Mittelwerk.  Rudolph was deported in 1984.  Kurt Debus, the first director of the Kennedy Space Center and an ideological Nazi during the war, avoided the investigation by passing away in 1983.  How would have von Braun fared if probed by the Justice Department?

Wherner von Braun and Kurt Debus, roll out of Saturn V, May 26, 1966. Credit: NASA

Von Braun’s supporters point out that he would have been executed had he opposed the working conditions at Mittelwerk.  No doubt, that is the case.  In fact, von Braun was arrested by the SS in 1944 for carelessly opining that the war was a lost cause and the future of rocketry would be space exploration.  However, this is a variation of the I was following orders routine, and von Braun was too high up in the food chain to use that as a passable defense.  Clearly, von Braun had charted his own course in the Nazi apparatus.  It is difficult to imagine a rigorous investigation ending well for von Braun.

What can we take from all this?  Under an oppressive authoritarian regime, you can leave the country, try to maintain institutional integrity within the system, or advance your career regardless of personal debasement.  If you want to leave, you’ll have more difficulty than Einstein securing a visa and a job.  If Max Planck could not preserve the integrity of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, what are the chances you’ll be able to where you are situated?  As for careerism, if landing a man on the Moon is not enough to cleanse questionable past associations, do you really think you could pull that off?

The easiest solution is simply to reject authoritarianism before it takes power.  Democracy is far easier to sustain by pushing for needed reforms than it is to re-institute it after it falls.  Authoritarianism typically ends in chaos, war in the case of Germany and Japan in 1945 and Syria today, economic in the case of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s or Venezuela today.  Regardless how you navigate your path through it, don’t think you will get out unscathed one way or another.

*Photo at top of post:  Nazi Germany’s loss is America’s gain. Albert Einstein receives from Judge Phillip Forman his certificate of American citizenship.  October 1, 1940.  Credit:  Al Aumuller/Library of Congress.