Friday, March 02, 2007

Germans in space

From the Times:
"Germany is planning to land an unmanned rocket on the moon in an ambitious revival of a dream that has haunted the country since the 1930s."
There's a number of references in the article to Germans planning to lay their beach-towels on the moon - which is rather unkind. And inaccurate, surely? [stereotype] For should they succeed in this enterprise, they'd be uncharacteristically late, would they not? [/stereotype]

4 comments:

dearieme said...

"land an unmanned rocket on the moon": today London, tomorrow zee moon.

Anonymous said...

Well considering that the Americans ony got to the moon first because 'their Germans were better than the Russian's Germans' this indeed all seems a bit redundant.

'the dream from the 1930s' is interesting.

In fact Germany produced the first SF film featuring rocket travel to the moon (Fritz Lang's and Thea von Harbou's Frau im Mond) that actually used real rocket scientists as technical advisors in 1929.

However under Hitler the rocket scientists joined secret military projects, science fiction was mostly banned and the few references to space travel that did creep into popular culture tended to be fanciful rather than realistic (for instance the lavish 1943 fantasy film Muenchausen in which the Baron travels to the moon by balloon rather than rocket).

So not sure who was doing the dreaming - possibly just Wernher von Braun and his friends who rather wistfully painted a logo frm the Frau im Mond film on the first working V-2 rocket knowing full well that the only place it would actually be going to would be London.

James Higham said...

Bratwurst and cheese all over the place. disgusting.

Anonymous said...

I believe it was the monkey-eating-surrender-cheeses (or some stereotype to that effect) that made a voyage to the moon first. I saw it in 1902 in a documentry, unusual landing.

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