by Robert Stone
Having brought von Braun’s entire team to Huntsville, the Army was now more comfortable with him entering the public spotlight. He had not spoken at either of the two American space conferences during the autumn of 1951, though other Operation Paperclip Germans—Dr. Hubertus Strughold and Heinz Haber—had delivered papers. Strughold had risen to prominence as a leading researcher on the physical and psychological effects of human spaceflight, but details about his past had been deliberately obscured. Indeed, it would be another four decades before allegations of his complicity in notorious Nazi-era human medical experiments were widely published. By 1951, public objection to government employment of the Paperclip scientists and engineers had largely subsided, though the Germans’ hopes for American citizenship would remain unfulfilled for a few more years.
In April 1951, journalist Daniel Lang published an extended profile of von Braun in The New Yorker. A former war correspondent who had covered World War II in Italy, France, and North Africa, Lang was intrigued by the ethical choices faced by men of science during the Cold War. Lang described von Braun’s personality as “exuberant rather than reflective” and thought he comported himself like “a man accustomed to being regarded as indispensable.” Unlike the reticence he displayed in later interviews, von Braun was unguarded with Lang, even confessing, “Working in a dictatorship can have its advantages, if the regime is behind you….We used to have thousands of Russian prisoners of war working for us at Peenemünde.” The profile also revealed that 80 percent of the Germans working at Redstone Arsenal had been members of the Nazi Party or affiliated organizations and that von Braun had been a party member. Pressed by Lang to address the morality of his decision to work for the German Army, von Braun explained, “We felt no moral scruples about the possible future abuse of our brain child….Someone else would have done the job if I hadn’t.” After the New Yorker profile appeared, von Braun became more cautious when talking to the press.
At the end of the year, Collier’s gathered a symposium of space experts in the magazine’s New York office, where von Braun was joined by Ley, Whipple, Bonestell, and others. In conjunction with the magazine’s forthcoming issue, Collier’s commissioned a series of detailed full-color illustrations of giant spacecraft reaching orbit and showing how humans would live and work in space. These were based on plans and sketches drawn up by von Braun and his team in Huntsville. Von Braun also assigned Gerd de Beek, a former Peenemünde staffer now at Redstone, to construct scale models of the huge rocket and space station. It was de Beek who had painted the Frau im Mond insignia on the first successfully launched A-4 in 1942.
In the weeks before the March publication date, the Collier’s staff concluded that von Braun was such an asset that they chose him as their spokesperson to promote the special issue at media events. After his national television debut on the Camel News Caravan, von Braun appeared several more times on the new medium within twenty-four hours. In Manhattan he traveled from one network broadcast studio to another for scheduled live interviews on the most popular programs. In the morning he was on the Today show on NBC; by the afternoon he was in a CBS studio chatting with entertainer Garry Moore. He even put in an appearance at the end of the day during a broadcast of ABC’s children’s adventure series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Whenever he appeared, he brought along de Beek’s models to illustrate his argument.
After working nearly seven years with little national recognition, von Braun was exuberant that his American moment had arrived. “I’m tickled to death about this TV and radio business,” he wrote Ryan. “Space rockets are hitting the big time!”
The Collier’s issue looked like nothing that had been seen previously in a mass-circulation general-interest magazine. Bonestell’s color illustrations provided eye-catching visions of space vehicles heading into orbit and space stations under construction. Equally impressive were the magazine’s cutaway diagrams showing the interiors of von Braun’s huge rocket and the rotating space station. The attention to detail in these images conveyed a convincing sense of accuracy, even though they were based on plans that were entirely imaginary. With a circulation of three million copies and an estimated reach of twelve to fifteen million readers, that single issue of Collier’s was believed to have been seen by 8 to 10 percent of the American public.
The Collier’s publicity campaign included department-store window displays and posters on buses, subways, and newsstands. The cumulative effect not only promoted the magazine, it suddenly transformed von Braun into the world’s most visible public proponent for space exploration. Collier’s introductory editorial emphasized space as a national defense and security concern, though military implications were downplayed in the articles. In von Braun’s feature article, “Crossing the Last Frontier,” he made reference to his orbiting “atomic bomb carrier” space station, but apocalyptic scenarios were kept to a minimum. Not that Collier’s was averse to exploiting Cold War fears to sell issues; two years previously they had commissioned Bonestell to paint disturbing scenes of Manhattan consumed by an atomic mushroom cloud. But with their space issue, Collier’s presented a more optimistic technological vision of the future, which promised both adventure and a new domain for human exploration. It was a welcome relief from concerns about nuclear proliferation, Soviet espionage, and the ongoing Korean stalemate.
So favorable and resounding was the reader and media response to that Collier’s immediately began planning additional space-themed issues. The next one hit newsstands October 1952 and featured articles about the first human voyage to the Moon. Von Braun continued to make public appearances, such as an extended segment on the only network TV program about science, The Johns Hopkins Science Review, which broadcast three separate thirty-minute episodes discussing the Collier’s series.
Culturally, the Collier’s issues had prompted a significant shift in public attitudes toward human spaceflight: The subject was no longer ridiculed or approached with embarrassment. At the San Antonio conference the previous year, the organizers had been reluctant to use the word “spaceflight” in the event’s title, for fear that it would diminish its seriousness. After spring 1952, politicians speaking about space travel seldom encountered the derision David Lasser had experienced on the floor of the House of Representatives a decade earlier.
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ON THE EVENING of July 9, 1952, CBS newsman Walter Cronkite sat in a wood-paneled studio in Chicago, covering the opening of the Republican National Convention. It was a decisive moment for the young journalist as well as for the country. Cronkite was anchoring the first live network broadcast of an American political convention. The GOP campaign had begun in New Hampshire the same week that von Braun made his TV debut. Now the field of candidates had narrowed to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ohio senator Robert Taft, and California governor Earl Warren.
The former speaker of the House, Joe Martin, Jr., gaveled the convention into session, and in a speech watched by millions, Martin attacked the Democrats in power as “disciples of a dead-end economy” who offered the youth of America nothing more than a “road to nowhere.” Martin then segued to offer a more optimistic vision of the future, and when doing so he appeared to have in mind a recent national magazine. “We have an entire new world about to unfold!” Martin promised. “I listen to the words of scientists and engineers….They are optimistic! They are visionary beyond our fondest dreams! They say that science and technical skill are uncovering new horizons that all but defy the imagination.” He described new advances in medicine, power, and transportation. Then Martin turned to the heavens. “Travel in space! I mean interplanetary travel—in our solar system—no longer is the figment of a cartoonist’s imagination. It is on the verge of reality! Who knows what wonders lie beyond the limit of our atmosphere, what new worlds will open to us?”
A foreigner who had arrived in the United States on the Queen Mary a few days earlier watched the convention with great
interest on the television set in his hotel room. Arthur C. Clarke was in America to promote the publication of his newest book of nonfiction, The Exploration of Space. The judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen it as a featured selection in the wake of the Hayden Planetarium conference and the enthusiastic response to the Collier’s issue.
Clarke sat up and listened to Joe Martin with astonishment. A politician was on national TV giving a speech that contained passages that could have been written by Clarke himself. “I didn’t expect the Republican Party to take official cognizance of the topics the science-fiction writers love to mull over,” he recalled later. He listened as Martin talked of smart “electronic computing machines” and wrist radios utilizing “a new invention no bigger than a postage stamp, called the transistor.” He was delighted. “After that, nothing could drag me away from the convention.”
This was only the second trip Clarke had taken outside of the United Kingdom, and as he traveled the United States, others aspects of 1950s America caught his attention. At the invitation of Ian Macaulay, a fanzine editor whom he had met at a science-fiction convention, Clarke traveled to Atlanta, Georgia. At that moment Macaulay was active in the fight for civil rights, organizing to end segregation in schools and public transportation and working to increase African American voter registration. Macaulay’s activism prompted some lengthy late-night discussions during which Clarke learned more about America’s long history of racial inequity.
Prior to coming to the United States, Clarke had never met any black people. He stayed with Macaulay again in Atlanta the following year, and during his return visit he was at work on the final pages of his novel Childhood’s End. In the book’s conclusion, an adventurous scientist named Jan Rodricks is selected by representatives of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization to witness the transformation of the human race into a higher form of life: a collective cosmic entity. Clarke’s decision to make Rodricks—his fictional representative of all mankind and “the last person on Earth”—an astronomer of black African descent was a bold and politically provocative choice for 1953.
Since reading a short story about a sympathetic alien in a 1934 issue of Wonder Stories, Clarke had been fascinated by science fiction’s potential to evoke empathy for alien characters and convey to readers the viewpoint and values of those from other cultures. During its formative decades, the genre’s predominantly male readership was hungry for escape from the mainstream culture and curious about emerging technologies and new ideas. Many science-fiction readers were intelligent yet socially marginalized in some way due to a variety of reasons, such as ethnicity, sexuality, religion, or race. Plus, conventional society’s habit of ostracizing and calling those with an interest in technical or intellectual subjects “nerds” or “eggheads” was familiar to a sizable segment of the genre’s readership. Not surprisingly, therefore, science-fiction readers often identified with the alien.
By the early 1950s, some science-fiction authors had begun using mass-market paperbacks as a literary vehicle to subtly question conventional attitudes about race and sexuality. The cover illustration on a 1952 book of short stories by Robert Heinlein featured the first visual depiction of a black astronaut, even though no such character was specifically described within the book, and publishers’ sales directors at the time expressly asked illustrators not to include African Americans on book covers, since it was assumed this would hinder sales south of the Mason–Dixon Line. A year later Weird Fantasy, a science-fiction comic book, published an allegory on American segregation in a story about an emerging civilization on a planet where orange robots are accorded privilege over the less entitled blue robots. In the story’s kicker ending, the space-suited emissary, who sits in judgment of the planet and denies its application for admission to a galactic republic, is revealed to be a black astronaut.
Robert Heinlein, who had also challenged social preconceptions about masculinity and femininity, wrote Tunnel in the Sky in 1955. In the young-adult novel, the race of the central protagonist is not overtly defined, but there are hints that he is black. Heinlein confessed that he used this literary device in an attempt to disarm his white readers, hoping that in the course of the narrative they would gradually come to realize the protagonist’s race after feeling empathy and identifying with him.
Writing in an essay for The New York Times shortly after his visit to Atlanta, Clarke addressed this issue as part of a larger defense of science fiction as literature. “Interplanetary xenophobia [in earlier science fiction] has given place to the idea that alien forms of life would have as much right to their points of view as we have. Such an attitude…can obviously help spread the idea of tolerance here on Earth (where heaven knows it’s needed).”
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THE SUMMER THAT Arthur Clarke returned to the United States and was finishing the manuscript of Childhood’s End, he finally met Wernher von Braun, when both were guests at the Washington, D.C., home of the American Rocket Society’s president. In a lengthy diversion from a dinner conversation about humanity’s future in space, Clarke described his love of scuba diving and explained that it was an effective way to simulate the experience of being weightless in space. He then vigorously urged von Braun to take up the sport for the same reason, which von Braun did only a few weeks later, remaining an active diver for most of his life.
Even while overseeing the development of the Redstone rocket and working on a top-secret plan to quickly and inexpensively launch the first satellite into orbit, code-named Project Orbiter, von Braun continued his public advocacy for human spaceflight. An unexpected opportunity arose directly as a result of the Collier’s publications, just as the magazine released its eighth and final space-themed issue, featuring a description of the first human voyage to Mars. In early 1954, Hollywood came calling, in the person of Walt Disney, who was interested in producing a series of well-financed hour-long documentary films based on the magazine series. Disney was in the midst of creating a new prime-time TV program, Disneyland, which would mix recycled older content and new programming in order to promote another new venture, his California theme park, scheduled to open in 1955.
Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun in 1955 collaborating on “Man in Space,” one of three space exploration–themed episodes broadcast on Disney’s weekly television series in the 1950s. The programs were seen in more than a third of American households, including the White House, where President Dwight Eisenhower tuned in.
At the suggestion of one of his top animators, Ward Kimball, Disney approved three space-related “Tomorrowland” episodes adapted from Collier’s articles. The first episode, “Man in Space,” had Ley, von Braun, and Heinz Haber discussing rocketry history, orbital science, and the physical challenges facing humans during spaceflight, before concluding with an animated look into the near future as humans first entered space. Disney’s choice to feature three onscreen experts with distinctive German accents became an issue of concern within the studio prior to filming, until it was deemed that their authenticity was more valuable than any possible negative associations. The history portion of the program included World War II–era footage of V-2 launches, yet there was no mention of Nazi Germany’s part in rocket development; the V-2 was merely referred to reverently as “the forerunner of spaceships to come.” Among the featured experts, it was von Braun who commanded the viewer’s attention. Looking into the camera, he confidently asserted, “If we were to start today on an organized and well-supported space program, I believe a practical passenger rocket can be built and tested within ten years.”
“Man in Space” premiered in the spring of 1955. Forty million households—more than a third of the American viewing public—watched the broadcast on their black-and-white televisions. Polling conducted that year revealed that nearly 40 percent of Americans believed “men in rockets will be able to reach the Moon” before the end of the century, a figure that had more tha
n doubled in six years. Once again, von Braun’s space advocacy had political repercussions. One viewer who saw “Man in Space” lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and after the broadcast Disney received a request from the Eisenhower White House for the loan of an exhibition print of the program so that it could be screened for Pentagon officials.
In nearly all of his entertainment, Disney promoted commonly accepted traditional American values. Though he kept his personal political attitudes out of the spotlight, Disney’s were conservative and anti-communist. Von Braun’s association with Disney therefore subtly bestowed an imprimatur of American respectability on the former official of the Third Reich. And in a final act of assimilation, a month after “Man in Space” aired, von Braun and more than one hundred other Germans working at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville appeared in a newsreel taking an oath of allegiance as they became U.S. citizens.
Von Braun was also celebrated in American public schools, many of which had recently introduced new audio-visual equipment into the classrooms. The Disney studio actively licensed 16mm exhibition prints of “Man in Space” as an entertaining teaching aid. Disney published a teacher’s study guide to use in conjunction with the screening, which featured von Braun’s photo on the cover and suggested classroom discussion questions such as “How likely is it that the present barriers between nations will tend to break down as contacts with other planets develop?”