As an American China doesn’t have to steal our tech. They’ve already surpassed America in every measurable metric except for Gdp and consumption which isn’t really a win at all.
China stealing technology is the whole reason why the USA doesn’t cooperate with them in space like it does other countries. So it hasn’t been that long since China felt like it needed to.
While I totally agree with this the irony is china turned out to be the slightly less evil capitalist than America. And only because of their one party system.
Wrong flag, bud.
The US didn’t steal these
guys rocket tech.They stole these
guys rocket tech.They are not the same.
“Hey, OP from Germany, why didn’t you put a Swastika on there?”
Technically we stole the engineers.
And a few choice prototypes
The formatting on this comment is terrible. Is it because of the app I’m using or just how it is? I use Voyager.
That’s how it’s meant to look like, on mobile it’s not as pretty (isn’t terrible tho)
I use voyager too. I shared the post to firefox and it looks the same so I don’t think it’s voyager.
Just let me have the Schadenfreude. It’s the only thing keeping me sane. :P
Everyone forgets Goddard. He invented what the German scientists perfected after a lot of government investments. The US didn’t want to go that way with Rocketry, until the world saw the Germans make it work.
The US set Goddard to work on Jet assisted take off in WWII.
I never got the issue with tech being “stolen”. Free exchange of information almost always helps everyone. The only class it doesn’t help is the capitalist class, which wants rent extraction by gatekeeping human advancements.
There are a great many things to criticise the Chinese state for. Allegedly “stealing tech” or “stealing western IP” however, has to be one of the weakest criticisms (even if it’s actually happening).
And in the case of AI models it’s straight up deranged to act like China is “stealing” from the US because US corporations trained those models on stolen data to begin with
Didn’t we actually steal Wernher von Braun?
The whole story is fascinating, if more than a little fucked up.
He and his engineering team decided to seek out US troops to surrender to because he didn’t want the Soviets getting their hands on his rocket tech. The US government got him out of the country, forged documents to get him into the US legally, granted him immunity and shielded him from being prosecuted for war crimes and atrocities he was involved in.
because he didn’t want the Soviets getting their hands on his rocket tech
I think it was more him not wanting to be caught by the Russians because it would be a lot more uncomfortable.
Probably both
He was sitting poolside at a resort when an US agent came up to him and said essentially “we found you, we also know where your family is. You can come with us and we’ll get you and your family out, or, you can wait for the Russians to find you, which won’t be long, and you can see what they do with you. The choice is yours, but make it right now.” So he went to the US because he felt his fate was better there. And he wasn’t just a scientist who was being used by the Nazis, he was a hardened nazi. He ran factories with slave labor that had executed corpses hanging from the ceiling. The workers had to go down a hallway to check into work where the bodies of sabotauers were on display and they had to punch them on their way onto the floor. He wasn’t just complicit in that and how things were run, those were his decisions. (I did a humongous project on the V-2 rocket when I was younger. Would have won the national competition in DC if I would have just answered one question the judges were essentially begging me to answer)
What was the question?
They wanted me to show that I understood that this was the beginning of space travel.
And that kids, is why you should study engineering in college.
So you can be scooped up after the war.
yes, and so much more. the americans actually took everything and anything rocket related they could get their hands on, trying to prevent the russians from doing the same.
Russians did the same, the Soyous rockets date (with many modernisation) back from stolen nazi V2 motors.
USSR develops the V2 into the R7, design elements from the R7 are used in the Scud. The Scud is exported to Egypt. North Korea trades Egypt for Scuds and base their rocket systems on it. Iran trades oil for Scud tech and develop their own ballistic missile and space program (Libya is in there somewhere too)
The V2 design has legs!
Yep, Saturn IV if I remember correctly
If your “we” or “us” includes the Nazis then you’ve probably made a mistake somewhere along the line.
They did Nazi that coming I guess!
I’ve seen plenty of tankies boasting that the Soviets were great space scientists.
Was that ever in doubt?
Tbf, they were quite good. Yes, they did take in German scientists and hardware to boost heir rocket program, but they mainly used them to transfer knowledge, and then dumped most of those scientists. And after that, they had indeed several very impressive feats. Like that Venus probe thing. I think that one was one of the best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_influence_on_Soviet_rocketry
