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Originally Posted by ToSeek
No, not Wernher von Braun:
Bernard Schriever's Stifling Shadow
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But it was Schriever who was the "American Korolev" – the real brain behind US rocketry in the early Cold War years. His Atlas, Titan, and Thor rockets were all retired as weapons by 1965, but they have enjoyed 45-year careers as the main American space launch vehicles.
Even Ariane and H-2 are based on Atlas technology transferred to Britain and Japan. Despite his fame, von Braun's Redstone, Jupiter, and Saturn families are all long extinct, and have no descendants flying today. More importantly, Schriever's management techniques have stood the test of time while von Braun's have proven a dismal failure.
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I also found the article self-contradictory and its premise false. Actually the common ancestor of all the rockets mentioned was the
Navaho, whose liquid fueled booster was adapted by all these programs. The Saturn family was designed in part as a heavy-lift group of boosters for applications beyond the Moon program. Unfortunately NASA, per the behest of Nixon, scrapped all these ELVs for the Space Shuttle project.
The only way Schriever's management techniques have stood the test of time is that there are still a lot of Theory X management types out there.