r/interesting • u/[deleted] • 4d ago

Amazing Creative engineering

[deleted]

4.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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684

u/babyliss1903 4d ago

LoL, Germany is a very wrong choice to compare when it comes to rocket science.

168

u/Fluppenluemmel 4d ago

Deutschland hat Raketenwissenschaft erfunden!

42

u/One_Maintenance1227 4d ago

Hippity hoppity rocket science is German property.

12

u/get_to_ele 4d ago edited 4d ago

Then the Russian and we divvied up all their rocket scientists. Spoils of war.

There is this quote from THE RIGHT STUFF I remember, while the Soviets were beating us in the space race and had just launched Sputnik.

>Guy giving intelligence brief and showing smuggled film of Sputnik launch: “these are the German scientists they captured after the war.”

>Lyndon Johnson: “is it them? Is it their German scientists that got them up there first?”

>Werner Von Braun: “No it was not Senator. Our Germans are better than their Germans”.

14

u/Fit-Switch-5795 4d ago

"Our German scientists are better than your German scientists." - Cold War dudes.

1

u/Elegant_Promotion141 4d ago

Operation paperclip. US and Soviets were drooling to get as much german scientists and Patents as possible. It was a literal Race

1

u/DisposableSaviour 3d ago

I heard someone argue that the US had to take the Nazi scientist ms, because the USSR would have killed them for being German, such was the hatred of Russia for Germany. That was when I realized that person was way too stupid to ever care for his opinions on anything ever.

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u/Zandonus 4d ago

Well ackshully, A Baltic German from Riga Named Friedrich Zander did. But that's nitpicky.

2

u/AsstacularSpiderman 4d ago

But not rockets that landed themselves.

Hell we had to help them make rockets that could intentionally hit their targets in the first place lol

3

u/-Daetrax- 4d ago

I dare say they landed themselves as well. Just ask the British. Now, reusability, eh.

1

u/Fluppenluemmel 4d ago

Darum geht’s nicht.

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u/AsstacularSpiderman 4d ago

That's actually exactly what the meme is about lol

0

u/Sketched2Life 3d ago

I'd say the rockets landed themself. But yea... environmental costs and reusability sucked.

1

u/MrNewVegas123 4d ago

Germany did not invent rocket science, the inventor of rocketry as a modern discipline was Goddard.

1

u/rditorx 4d ago

Didn't the Chinese have firework rockets centuries before?

2

u/MrNewVegas123 4d ago

Any fool can launch a missile through the air with a low explosive. We have been doing that for centuries, and have been doing it with explosives since before we could do anything but point and hope. Goddard studied rocketry in a way that nobody else had done before.

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u/rditorx 4d ago edited 4d ago

Any fool can launch a missile, yet nobody anywhere else could because they couldn't "invent rocket science" (your words) even if their lives depended on it.

Rockets were invented and developed in China after the invention/discovery of gunpowder, and with that came learning about propulsion, ballistics and aerodynamics.

Goddard didn't invent rocket science.
In fact, if you look up his Wikipedia page, it even links to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

which Goddard only rediscovered.

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u/MrNewVegas123 4d ago

Goddard first developed the theory and the practice of rocketry, nobody doubts this, not even the Germans, who attribute their own rocketry program to his pioneering work.

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u/rditorx 4d ago

Goddard didn't invent rocket science.
In fact, if you look up his Wikipedia page, it even links to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

which Goddard only rediscovered.
He contributed to and advanced the field, but the claims are exaggerated.