Book Review: Von Braun Dreamer of Space...

I recently finished this book Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War by Michael Neufeld.

This post is a reprint of my book review on Amazon.com

Debbie Downer History of Von Braun
This deeply detailed biography seems to say that von Braun's popular image was more about fame and personality than real accomplishments or importance in the history of the Space program and even before. Not having studied the man before, I have to admit to buying in the general mythology of his too until reading this. From an American perspective, there is something very positive about his life, he is the ultimate immigrant success story, a case of American pragmatism to accept a national of a former enemy and promote him to the very heights of power in our government, that opportunism (on both sides) is very Stangelove-ian and in strange way admirable to me. He was apparently a likeable and charismatic man with big dreams when the country was thinking big, so its not hard to see his rise to fame and power. The book, though, takes a hard look at his active cooperation with or at best neutrality towards the highest levels of the Nazi regime and the crimes of war in the production of the V2. Further complicating is the probable deceitfulness he expressed in later denying much of the story of his true involvement and an apparent lack of personal guilt. I am sure if I agree with the author that this criticism is deserved, but it is quite surprising to find out he was an SS officer.

I found that overall it seemed like the author was a little lopsided in the flow of the narrative, usually moving between personal/political challenges then various technical issues without any real success. It almost seemed like he never actually got any rockets or missles to actually work. Usually by the time the technical issues are sorted, the discussion moves to some other crisis, or the next project, with rarely discussing the actual successes. For instance, based on the way the book describes it, it didn't seem like they actually had any completely successful tests of the A4/V-2 before it was put into production and active duty, yet didn't thousands not in fact hit London and Antwerp (very little about the actual V2 bombings was mentioned)? After the war it seemed as of Von Braun and the rest of the paperclip scientists spent 5-6 years doing little of anything in Texas, later Huntsville, AL, which if totally accurate is amazing considering how much attention that group of scientists was given supposedly. His group's contributions to the overall American rocket and missile field appear modest, without much impact on the Cold War. Whole chapters deal with the US Army's efforts to develop ballistic missiles, such as Redstone and Jupiter-C, were either ever used for anything in practice? The book basically portrays these efforts as one development issue or lack of mission crisis after the other with little mention of any actual outcome from these efforts. Its hard to miss the success of the Saturn V and von Braun's central role in that effort, due to the Apollo moon landings, though great pains are taken to portray him as as subordinate center director in NASA rather than a leading figure. In the end his tenure at NASA headquarters is described as a depressing frustration and his post-NASA career also at Fairchild is also portrayed with mix results.

Maybe the author was purposefully trying to contradict some other more glowing histories of the man, though I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. A lot of the details of his personal and professional life still do impress, even if he didn't really do anything successfully, he seemed to work pretty hard for his entire career.

The more I read about the subjects of NASA (To the Ends of the Solar System, Moon Hunters), the more of a happy coincidence we had to even get to the moon (Kennedy's promise, followed by a pro-space successor in Johnson). It is quite eye opening to read these behind the scenes accounts of the political and budgetary battles in government that ended up killing any really expansive manned space program after Apollo that we've all read about. Its amazing how the government made it seem like we were on this mission to the next big thing it just needed more time, when in reality they were consciously killing programs that would get us to Mars or put stations in space.

I read the book in paperback edition. One improvement is that it could have used some maps of Europe and Germany, especially for the Peenemünde era and World War II. As an aside his name is pronounced in German: "Vairner fon Brown"

Too Basic

As a follow up to my last post on our struggling redwoods. I've performed some tests of the soil pH

So somewhat ruling out the pot size for now, the temperature and weather didn't really seem to be a factor. We had a really mild winter this year, almost no snow, and not too cold. Again both redwoods have been indoors, and sitting by some windows, so they probably never get much colder than around 60 degrees or so. The only other thing I haven't really checked, is the pH level of the soil, I read somewhere that they need a slightly acidic soil (pH 5.5 - 6.0).

From a a local garden supply store I bought a pH testing kit with 10 uses. Its pretty simple to use. Just put some soil into the test container, add a special capsule of grey powder and mix with water. I took a sample from B2, shown here before mixing.

Here is the result after about a minute of settling. The color didn't come through great, but it was a fairly dark green, looking to be around pH 7.0 - 7.5, which is too alkaline according to the info I have above.

According to the kit anyway, there isn't much you can do to change a soil that is alkaline to more acidic, though they do mention some: aluminum sulfate or iron sulfate as ways to lower pH.

Will any of this work for B2?