He wasn't wrong, except that the point of the space race was demonstrating the country's ability to put a missile anywhere on Earth, not to explore space. Once you can send people to the moon and bring them back, you've proven that you can hit anywhere in the world with a missile. Staying longer, going further - those don't change the proof.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Some (many?) people involved were really interested in the scientific value of these efforts, but didn’t realize that the funding was largely for the reasons you mentioned or at least hoped that once they showed results they might excite people enough to keep the funding going.
Yeah, and von Braun was famously hyperfocused on space travel, surely with some blindness about politics.
First powered flight: 1903. Moon landing: 1969.
Between the first ever flight and landing on a different planet took only 66 years. There were people living in the 1970s who could remember seeing the first planes in their childhood. So from these advances it wasn't really unrealistic to extrapolate to moon bases and whatnots.
And that will most definitely be the case if billionaires wouldn’t have taken over the world.
Yeah, there was definitely no technical impediment, just politics cutting funding to space exploration. Same reason there's homelessness and people forgoing health care for financial reasons.
Assuming linear progress, Von Braun would have been correct. He failed to anticipate the limited attention span of the American public. By the 3rd or 4th moon landing, televised showings of it were already drawing less viewers than reruns. People just don't care that much.
Additionally, there's the increase of anti-science in the USA up to, and including, people who think space, the moon, or various other things are "fake".
The only bit of sci-fi we got was an ever-present surveillance state, now being augmented by AI. Not the future I would have wanted, but it's the one we got.
To simplify, he didn't anticipate Reagan.
iirc Wernher von Braun had also been optimistic about the Nazi Party.
Has there ever even been a reason to have a space station of some sort on our moon? There's really not a lot there and its expensive as fuck to keep humans alive on it. Only real reason i can think of would be ease of cooling and power generation for computing without damaging our own environment, and that is a very recent "need".
You’re underestimating the difficulty.
Getting to space is indescribably hard.
Maintaining a manned base in an ocean trench or an open lava pit or under sea ice would be cheaper.
The only rationale is science (which is very important), but Van Braun couldn’t really envision today's computerized drones and comms networks. As an example, the opposite side of the moon would be an excellent spot for certain types of space telescopes.
There are some speculative sci fi industries, like helium-3 mining, asteroid mining, space solar, or solar shades to reduce global warming, but nothing that’s even in the universe of cost effective now.
At a very minimum you could use the research bases at Antarctica as an example and give the same objections and same reasons for having a Moon base with similar number of people. Exploitation of resources makes even the worst places suddenly desirable, so that's the next question - does the Moon have resources for us, now or for future need? I think it could, and it's a great place to launch raw material from vs. Earth. Would it ever be a large settlement though, I doubt it.
I've always been a proponent of Gerard O'Neill's vision (The High Frontier). Why spend so much effort to escape from a gravity well to then go back to any other gravity well with a different and hostile environment (like Mars). Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to everywhere else, you just need enough delta-v and time. Space settlements would be a larger investment than we've ever done before, but once started they would multiply and return so much more.
Caveat, this is my past self talking. I now think the window of doing such things has closed on us, ironically when we need it the most. Such as removing eggs out of one basket that's dying, moving industry out of the biosphere it's choking, giving a new goal for humanity that all could participate and create their own worlds. It was a nice vision though, we could have done a lot.
I don't think that would work either. Without an atmosphere, any bodies of water or really anything at all, you'd be stuck with impractically slow radiative cooling.
Yep, there's a fuckload of minerals on the moon, and in our solar system. Enough metals to probably crash a handful of industries on Earth. The moon would be a useful gateway to many of the outer planets since it's gravity is weaker, and there's no atmosphere, in addition to the raw materials.
For mining, refueling* and power generation*, the moon makes a ton of sense.
*Some of these require technologies we don't yet have, but may soon.
Enough metals to probably crash a handful of industries on Earth.
Not even remotely economical, if we account for the transport costs.
The moon would be a useful gateway to many of the outer planets since it's gravity is weaker, and there's no atmosphere, in addition to the raw materials.
And what do we want to do there? It has the same problem as the moon.
Proof you should never listen to Nazis when they talk about space.
By 1990 we had landet on mars multiple times, and flown by the outer planets. Now we have crafts anywhere from inside the suns corona to outside the solar system.
There just isn't a need to bring humans along.
Werner von Braun was responsible for figuring out how to get tickets to go up and sometimes come down. He wasn't in charge of paying for it. Those bean counters said "but we have a base on earth" and never put money into science after a short series of successes.
Makes sense given the 80's is when we limited to only orbital. If we had made proper space and environmental progress between then and 2000 we would be living on a much better planet.