Rocket science isn’t a Nazi’s alone thing, it’s built on years of physics, and many other scientists around the world were working on how to translate the physics into a physical device. The dubious honor of Germany building the first successful ones will always be a part of history. But much like no one who knows a wheel exists reinvents it from scratch for the sake of doing it, nobody reinvented the rocket from scratch once they knew it existed. Paperclip grabbed Von Braun, the Soviets grabbed a ton of his engineers for their program, and China’s rocket systems are built by their scientists on the science of the systems that were developed before them. All three have diverged into their own methods, but science shares information, and no matter who does it, the US, China, Russia, the EU, India, the science will always be tied to Germany.

As for why I would be able to appreciate even a marginal effort at a scientific expedition. Well, here in the US we have a regime and a substantial part of the population who are terrifyingly opposed to science, as well as billionaires who want to privatize space exploration. The fact that NASA still exists at is astounding. It’s nice to see my tax dollars go towards a rocket that sends humans around the moon for the sake of seeing if we can go around the moon instead of towards a rocket that some genocidal zealots use to bomb refugee camps or a drunken tv host uses to jump start Armageddon. Science for the sake of science and not at the expense of another is not a team vs team sport. Whatever goes right or wrong on this mission is just data someone else can use to adjust their own program. And really, crewed expeditions to the moon and back, even without landing, are still a helluva lot more difficult than even getting into orbit and back safely.