Somewhere on the Internet, a t-shirt being sold that shows a picture of Che and, underneath, “Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Supporters of space exploration have to accept that the two greatest historic steps towards the stars were made by two of the bloodiest regimes in human history. Why was it that Nazi Germany and the USSR both turned towards rockets? Was it because they wanted to expand humanity’s presence in the solar system? If not, then why did they do it?

In both cases it was partly because they lacked the ability to bomb targets in their enemies’ homeland. Germany’s V-2 program never really got going until after the Luftwaffe had lost the Battle of Britain in 1940. Their inability to dominate the skies over England led Hitler to give von Braun’s rocket team a major funding boost. A few years later, Stalin’s lack of any effective way to fly atomic bombs across the Atlantic or over the Arctic pushed him, and later Khrushchev, to back Korolev’s efforts to build the R-7 ICBM that, fifty years ago, launched the space age.

On a more basic level, what was it about these totalitarian states that made their leaders more open to the idea of rocketry than the leaders of the democracies? The US, for example, could have supported Robert Goddard’s endeavors in 1942 and 1943 with far greater enthusiasm than was the case. After all, at that time the allied bomber offensive over Germany was losing aircraft and men at what seemed to be an unsustainable rate.

What distinguished the Nazis and Communists from previous tyrannies was that they did not base their rule on divine right or on tribal loyalty—though these played a role—but on their own interpretation of “scientific truth”. The Nazis claimed that racial science, derived from a perverted reading of Darwin, gave them, as the master race, the right to rule or wipe out those they considered inferior. The Communists, basing themselves on Marx as well as on Darwin, claimed that “scientific socialism” gave them the right, as the vanguard of the proletariat, to impose their rule on an unwilling world. The Russian answer to this was to joke that, “Our socialist system cannot really be scientific, since real scientists would have tested it on rats first.”

Both systems tried to combine an appeal to archaic nationalist values with a promise that they would own the future.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/969/1