He gives us the swept back lines of the modern jet aircraft.
Examining the Impact of the Space Race is an excellent NBC News special from correspondent Tom Brokaw that chronicles the space race that took place during the 1950s, 60s and 70s between the United States and the Soviet Union. The V2 was a rocket that Hitler was keen to have built by Wernher von Braun, and it rained terror on London and Antwerp in the last year of the war. Malina had gone to Paris, but Tsien was still working at Cal Tech. His politics were not particularly controversial at the time; it was just that later during the McCarthy era they became much more of concern to the FBI. I see him as the most important engineer you’ve probably never heard of. MacDonald: It’s really interesting. But there was a dark side to the space race. It is no coincidence that it starts there, because it takes slightly unconventional types, first of all, to be attracted to this domain of science, then to make it work, which they did. Knowledge@Wharton: Did some of your research come from FBI files that had been locked away? Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India.
The technological superiority required for the dominance of space was deemed a necessity for national security, and it was symbolic of ideological superiority. Los Angeles is known as a center for airplane design, and that is why the rocket work starts there. Knowledge@Wharton: Tell us more about Frank Malina, who left engineering and became a painter. There is a cluster of engineers at Cal Tech who are really trying to pioneer things like propeller design and air foil design, and they’ve got the tools to do that. There’s an impetus to try and batten down the hatches a bit and become much more secretive and much less cooperative in terms of a collaborative international space endeavor. I just kind of blinked at some of the allegations that were contained in this FBI file. You mentioned that there is a link between the Nazi Party and the Jet Propulsion Lab. … In 1975, the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission sent three U.S. astronauts into space aboard an Apollo spacecraft that docked in orbit with a Soviet-made Soyuz vehicle. The long term effects of the space race on Nebraska and other regions of the country came in the way the space race changed the educational system and the imaginations of our people. The idea of rocket science in the 1930s was ridiculous.
But once Malina had left the United States, and once Malina’s colleagues started making allegations of espionage, the entire security apparatus descended on Tsien, who was still at Cal Tech. But yes, it’s a remarkable history and, to reiterate a point I made earlier, just a great strategic mishap to deport for no good reason an engineer that actually hands on such important technology to what was then a rival communist state.
Eventually both nations joined forces in the Apollo-Soyez mission, which effectively ended the space race and ushered in a new era of collaboration between the two countries. It is that strain of engineering that is extremely important in the later development of the Apollo program. They just found this utterly abhorrent.
I think it is likely to end up creating unhappy side effects. So, they just took 1,600 engineers from Germany over to the United States under the auspices of an operation called Operation Paperclip.