Your tracker correspondent must confess to knowing little about Al Jazeera, other than that it's a private company with headquarters in Qatar, has grown steadily into an international news agency with a large staff, and has picked up awards and other accolades. It gets lots of scoops, particularly from the Arab as well as broader Islamic world, but aims to appeal to a broad audience. (By the way and having nothing to do with this post but it comes to mind: an Al Jazeera man is one of next year's Knight Fellows).
I came across the following story via a tweet-sized squib from Boing Boing's science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker, thought the topic interesting if not quite news journalism, took a look at it and despite my confessed ignorance of the outlet found myself saying, "this is at Al Jazeera?" Instinctively I would expect breaking news on politics, entertainment, cultural contrasts, etc, but not this so much.
- Aljazeera – Amy Shira Teitel: Wernher von Braun: History's most controversial figure? Pivotal to the history of spaceflight, von Braun's Nazi past makes him incredibly difficult to talk about ;
This is a freelance piece. Al Jazeera, apparently, bought it. That's fine. I don't know why it did but it is, to old space nuts such as yours truly, a fascinating walk through history. I'd quarrel with the hed's question. Most controversial figure in history, ever, more than anybody? That's ridiculous. More than Madonna, Attila, Wagner, Genghis Kahn, Darwin, Elvis, or Pope Stephen VI? One hopes Ms. Teitel didn't write that. The story is fascinating, and utterly does nothing to tell readers which way to fall. Was von Braun just a witless aristocrat so bonkers about space travel that he was innately blind to the evil of Naziism, or was he in fact a racist and calculating fiend who knowingly advanced his own career and dreams while overseeing slave labor horrors at a V-2 rocket factory? She reports, you decide, and I mean that in the best possible (ie non-Fox news) way.
The account in any case is dead-on science writing and technology history, if not science journalism.
Ms. Teitel appears to be quite the rocket gal, nuts about space and delta v's. She has written before about the historic roots of today's space age in Nazi-sponsored German research. I lifted, while hoping no copyright is being violated, the illus above from a post, The History of the Dyna-Soar, that she put on her website Vintage Space (link to it via her website) two years ago. That story is a fine account of German roots for a different US space program – an ultimately stillborn US Air Force manned orbital platform and NASA X-plane. If you find such twisted ancestries in technology fascinating, you should know that Teitel's post from two years ago recounted much but not all of the full, heavily complicated genaology for that Air Force effort. It has progeny that may yet fly. A start-up rocket company, Sierra Nevada Corp., as recounted in this piece of aerospace history writing, has the latest generational iteration:
- Before It's News – Edward Wright (Feb 3, 2013) : Dream chaser Builds on Decades of Experience ; Egad, even the Soviet Union got into the begats of this one.
Leave a Reply