Absolutely. And Lindbergh was a terrible person to boot. On the other hand, I know that Paul MacCready and his team designed the Gossamer Albatross pedal powered plane and until looking up the Wikipedia article didn’t know the guy pedaling and piloting it was Bryan Allen. That’s how it should be, I think.
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Well, you could say the same for military tech (and space is really an offshoot of that – that’s why military contractors traditionally built the spacecraft). We got computers and jet airliners probably decades earlier than we would have thanks to WWII. I’m not sure that was worth it though.
True enough. I am hoping we are the better versions of the best of who we are now.
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Oh, I hope so, too. But that arc of history must be bent towards justice, it won’t bend itself.
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[insert preach gif here]
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“We got Teflon from the space programme!” is about the worst and most misguided argument you could possibly make for it, I think.
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It turns out that every great thing ever done was done by flawed people for often less than pure reasons, with motivations that in retrospect seem confused and conflicted.
Personally I like to think that they did they great thing with all of their human limitations means that there’s some hope for the rest of us.
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And they guy they got to play Neil Armstrong looks more like Lee Harvey Oswald.
Well for some folks it’s better that the attention goes to the guy in the tin can, who with his superior test pilot skills/temperament, held his cool at key moments and did what needed to be done so this worked out as they all had planned; much better this person be lionized than the man at the back of NASA, that “special immigrant” Wernher von Braun:
https://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/bio.html
I don’t think we’re going to see a hagiography of von Braun anytime soon (though who knows these days), but a very interesting movie about the US could be made there.
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Indeed. Operation Paperclip (the US program to recruit German scientists in exchange for immunity from prosecution) and the lesser known equivalent Soviet program Operation Osoaviakhim (although “recruitment” was a bit of a euphemism in that case), greatly influenced both countries’ space programs.
Great question! The F1 driver or the team? The lead singer, the drummer, or the engineers? Quarterback or coach? Richard Branson or pilot Michael Alsbury that died in VSS Enterprise. The designer that drew the iphone, or the guy wearing a turtleneck? Lots of examples and ideas in there.
As for how the astronauts became the face of the program, seems like these post WWII all american men were the obvious PR move. Guts, fast cars, flag waving QB from down the street.
Gene Krantz is known today, but I’m unsure how well he was known then? Chalk board engineer vs corvette driving rocket men.
And of course, as others have said, von Braun is a no go.
“Ha, Nazi schmazi ,” says Wernher von Braun
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And Bryan Allen is perhaps more deserving of fame than most pilots, since he was the Albatross’s powerplant. Getting that thing in the air must’ve been a fairly impressive athletic feat, though not nearly as impressive as designing a plane that could lift itself and a person with just a few hundred watts of power.
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But, does that mean that it is not a fun movie?
Oh God, this is going to be utterly humorless and VERY SERIOUS, right?
Fun is of course in the eye of the proverbial beholder.
For me, no, more of the same old blinkered white male American triumphalism doesn’t sound fun at all. YMMV of course, especially I suspect if you’re a white American male (who can therefore better “relate” to this movie’s protagonist).
I’m so tired of these remakes.
The original was so much better:
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Hmm. On the counter-case, a lot of WWII R&D was spent pushing designs already on the drafting table into production. On the British side, jet engine development was delayed because it just didn’t fit British war plans at the time. Television was a thing before WWII that was shelved for later. Also, we’ll never know many inventions, discoveries and great people the 20th century lost in the trenches, battlefields and civilian casualties of WWI and WWII.
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