The only thing "extraterrestrial" in Philip Corso's book "The Day After Roswell", is the height of his tall tales, certainly the tallest Roswell tales to date. His thesis of course (for those of you blessed with not hearing this rubbish before) is that many of our high-tech advances such as microcircuits (and the transistor before IC's), lasers, fiber optics, microwave ovens, Star Wars SDI weapons, etc., all actually came from "reverse engineering" the alien technology found in the crashed UFO near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947 -- a feat largely made possible by Corso himself when he purportedly divvied up the alien goodies while working at Army R&D in the early 60's. But in his haste to cash in on Roswellmania he has made some fantastic blunders of history that completely expose him as a fraud in the most embarrassing way.

Last Rocketeers Set Sights on Mars
8 December 2004

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Four men and one woman, all around 90 years old, gather in a conference room and pour themselves coffee -- rocket fuel for the last of the original rocketeers.

Just outside, in Rocket Park, looms some of their handiwork: Gemini and Mercury rockets, a lunar lander and a gigantic rusting Saturn V from the Apollo program.

These five people were among 118 German rocket scientists bundled up and brought to the USA after World War II. Working for the Nazis, the rocket scientists had made Hitler's deadly V-2s. Reconstituted in Huntsville, the group vaulted U.S. rocket technology ahead by a decade and developed the rockets that allowed their adopted country to win the space race.

The group's inspirational leader, Wernher von Braun, helped persuade President Kennedy to make his famous commitment to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

Today, only 12 of that group are still living, including the five gathered here recently to help raise money to restore the Saturn V outside. Even as the remaining rocketeers fade away, they are suddenly relevant again to a new generation. For almost 30 years after Apollo, the American public seemed indifferent to space. But now, technology entrepreneurs -- members of a generation raised on Star Trek and Star Wars -- are again making space sexy.

Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen funded SpaceShipOne, which this fall won the X Prize for boosting civilian space travel. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has started a private company that will work toward putting people on Mars. Elon Musk, who founded online bill-paying service PayPal, has started a space company. Mogul Richard Branson is aiming to be the first to put hotels in space.

To this new generation, the German rocketeers are an inspiration. For the rocketeers, the techies are reviving their dearest hope: that man will go to Mars.

''If private industry takes tourists into space, it might uplift the whole program again,'' says Konrad Dannenberg, 92, a propulsion expert on Apollo. ''I'm very hopeful.''

Ernst Stuhlinger, 92, who was von Braun's right-hand man, twinkles when asked about the new generation's dreams of Mars flights. ''We old-timers have been thinking that way for a very long time.''

Forced to make missiles the rocketeers have long been haunted by their earlier lives.

In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of research into the new idea of launching rockets into space. A young von Braun took the lead, launching his first rockets in 1934. As World War II approached, the Nazis created a rocket team under von Braun at a secret base on an island at Peenemünde, Germany. They were ordered to make military missiles, not spaceships.

The team developed the V-2, which killed 2,500 British civilians. The rockets were built by concentration camp labor in tunnels.

The rocketeers have always said they had no choice. They say they wanted to build rockets to go to the moon and Mars, not to carry explosives. ''We couldn't even talk about space flight,'' Dannenberg says. ''Von Braun was at a party and talked about it with some people, and the Nazis found out and put him in jail.'' He was later released, but the message was clear.

As Germany's defeat seemed certain in 1945, the rocketeers made a calculated move. ''It was clear nothing was going to happen in Germany in space after the war,'' Dannenberg says. If the rocketeers wanted to pursue their dream, they would have to go elsewhere. The group decided they'd have their best shot with the Americans. They hid their research papers in a mine shaft, forged travel documents, and as many as 500 people -- scientists and their families -- moved toward the approaching American Army -- avoiding the Gestapo, who might have arrested or shot them. They holed up in an abandoned fortress in the Alps.

Von Braun sent his younger brother, Magnus, off on a bicycle to try to find the Americans. He stumbled across Pvt. Fred Schniekert of Sheboygan, Wis., and tried to explain that a whole team of rocket scientists wanted to surrender. Schniekert said, ''I think you're nuts,'' but relayed the message to his superiors, who recognized the value of the rocketeers.

The Army raced to Peenemünde to get there before the Soviets. The rocketeers' papers and every project and spare V-2 part were loaded on 300 rail cars that were shipped to the USA. And then the U.S. government took its own calculated risk: It transferred the 118 former enemy rocket scientists and their families to Fort Bliss, Texas, and eventually to an abandoned military base in Huntsville.

Beating Russia to the moon over the next decade, the rocketeers didn't have much to do. ''We called ourselves PoPs -- prisoners of peace,'' Stuhlinger quips. John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and soon after fell from grace with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. A few years before, the USSR had beaten the USA to space with its Sputnik satellite.

''Kennedy wanted to do something to regain America's prestige,'' Stuhlinger recalls. Kennedy asked Vice President Lyndon Johnson to write letters seeking advice. One went to von Braun.

Stuhlinger has copies of memos that bounced between von Braun and the White House. Von Braun laid out everything he knew about the capabilities of U.S. and Soviet rockets. He concluded that the USA would have little chance of beating the Soviets to a manned space lab, but would have a ''sporting chance'' of beating them to an orbit of the moon and ''an excellent chance'' of beating them to a moon landing.

In other words, the USA didn't go to the moon because it was there. We went because we could get there first.

In a speech in May 1961 Kennedy laid out one of history's great mission statements: ''This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.''

''The irony is that in the 1960s, we went from nothing to landing a person on the moon in eight years,'' says space entrepreneur Musk. ''Today it would take two or three times as long, and that's crazy.''

Astronaut Walter Schirra, 81, who flew three space missions, was one of the seven original Mercury astronauts when he heard about Kennedy's speech. ''I couldn't believe we'd made that commitment,'' he recalls. ''So many things happened so fast. I'd just flown Mach 2 for the first time in 1958.'' To get to the moon would require speeds of Mach 25, which would take engines 60 to 70 times more powerful. ''That's a big leap.''

The von Braun team numbered 400 in 1961. It quickly swelled to 8,000. But the Germans were the leaders, and von Braun was the star. ''That was important,'' Stuhlinger says. ''We had a von Braun. There is no von Braun today.''

''If the Germans had not been here, the technology would've been delayed by 10 years, 15 years,'' says Mark Smith, who knows the Germans from his years as CEO of Adtran,a Huntsville tech company. ''No group of people is indispensable, but they shrunk the time frame.''

Rules about federal contracts and processes were tossed. ''We could make decisions in almost no time,'' says Walter Haussermann, who led development of guidance controls. He remembers talking with IBM about supplying the mission's computers. He was able to say yes in two days. ''Today, it would take years,'' he says.

Thanks to the Germans' experience, glitches rarely slowed the project. The only disaster: a fire in the Apollo 1 that killed the three-man crew. Manned flights were delayed for nearly two years to make sure it didn't happen again. Ask the Germans how they accomplished so much so quickly, and they struggle for an answer. They note the commitment from Kennedy, the military and the American public -- all pulling toward a single goal. Schirra, who often worked closely with the Germans, says the space race was like a years-long adrenaline rush. ''It was a competition with Russia, and we had to beat them,'' he says.

Mostly, though, the Germans seem nonchalant, as if it were easy to put a man on the moon in eight years. ''We all believed it could be done,'' Dannenberg says with a shrug.

New generation takes over so now comes a new age.

Interest in space dropped after the first moon landings. Travel to Mars seemed unlikely. Discouraged, the Germans dropped out of NASA. Von Braun died in 1977.

But a young generation at NASA has put two robot rovers on Mars and wowed the public. President Bush has talked of Mars missions. Mostly, though, entrepreneurs have picked up where the rocketeers left off.