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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

> Rockets.

From the wikipedia of V-2 Rockets:

> The world's first large-scale experimental rocket program was Opel-RAK under the leadership of Fritz von Opel and Max Valier, a collaborator of Oberth, during the late 1920s leading to the first manned rocket cars and rocket planes,

Looks like rockets were invented before a global war broke out with peaceful intentions, then the military used that invention for violence, as a global war broke out.

Just because an invention is used for war doesn’t mean it required one to be invented.

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>Looks like rockets were invented before a global war broke out with peaceful intentions, then the military used that invention for violence, as a global war broke out.

This presupposes that the V2 is the first use of rocketry in history which...well, it's just not true. You conveniently skipped over the bit about Congreve rockets, which were invented in the late 18th/early 19th century, explicitly for war, or the growing evidence about the use of gunpowder rocketry in Imperial China. Both of these uses were explicitly NOT peaceful. (not hargreve, I misremembered in the OP post).

Also, if you bother to read the article you referenced, it makes it clear that literally nothing came of the experiments apart from that book. It took a war to get the funding and manufacturing resources available to actually _do the work_ of advancing rocketry.

EDIT: to sound less like an asshole and engage with the comment on its face value.

Technological inventions connect like a web. There is a reason James Burke named his show “Connections”. We can move the goal post for any given invention wherever we like, really. If V-2 wasn’t invented for the military, then we can simply move the goalpost such that we mean another type of rocket, but make sure not to move it sideways such that the invention could be used as a transport propellant or for signalling.

But I wish to step aside now and acknowledge how silly this whole argument is—as most arguments are when it comes to alternate history. Historically the military has been the most well funded of all government enterprises so it should come as no surprise that many innovations happen under such well funded programs. But that does not mean that is the only possible outcome. Humans kept innovating and inventing even as funds were diverted to non-violent endeavors. Today we have universities which are well funded and engage in research, often handing out their gathered knowledge to the rest of humanity (James Webb space telescope can attest to this). Who know what we would have invented already if it wasn’t for the military taking most of the attention of historic societies?

You can’t really compare solid fuel rockets with liquid fueled rockets. And rockets fed by turbopumps (unlike the earlier pressure-fed models made by Goddard and others) are in a class of their own.

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