The Space Erasure
JD Vance is more wrong about immigrants and NASA than he realizes.
I wrote and produced an audiobook telling the stories of the engineers and personalities who took Apollo from a Cold-War Hail Mary to a paradigm-shattering moon landing in just 8 years in the 1960’s. The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon was a passion project on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, which, as it happened, aligned nicely with a time when I was between jobs.
That shameless plug1 is really just a way to say that JD Vance got my attention last week when he gave a false history of immigrants, NASA, and the moon landing:
"The American Space Program, the first program to put a human being on the moon, was built by American citizens. This idea that American citizens don't have the talent to do great things, that you have to import a foreign class of servants, I just reject that."
Vance and Trump anti-immigration architect Stephen Miller have been making the case for why the U.S. doesn’t need foreign students or their expertise when they stay after graduation. He was at the intersection of two of my main interests: space and politics. And he got it conspicuously, and confidently, wrong. He got it wrong for what his track record suggests are very damaging and dangerous reasons.
The Werner diaries
The Internet has already well dunked on the claim that immigrants didn’t figure critically into Apollo’s success. The dashing, and exceedingly famous father of Saturn V rocket was a German immigrant, or rather, a spoil of war. Werner Von Braun was also a Nazi, as were most of the roughly 900 to 1,000 German engineers and scientists the U.S. effectively captured at the close of World War II as part of Project Paperclip. (Kudos to each of the many dozens who beat me to this.)
Von Braun, granted U.S. citizenship and eager to leave his SS uniform and war crimes tribunals behind, became the face of America’s pre-NASA space exploration vision in the 1950’s. And that face was everywhere, plastered on weekly magazines on millions of American coffee tables, and featured on Sunday night Disney specials in millions of American homes.
By the time President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to go to the moon in 1961, Von Braun had already helped imbue American culture with an expectation of a new age of orbiting space stations, all serviced by the rockets he was eager to build. If you watch the “Blue Danube” space-ballet scene of “2001: A Space Odyssey” you’ll get the picture. (Stanley Kubric sure did.) That flashy, grinning media savvy is partly why JFK liked Von Braun so much, and why he was eager to hitch is political fortunes to the German’s star, according the Douglas Brinkley in the book American Moonshot.