Red Moon Rising

4 TOMORROWLAND

Much as the Anglo-French incursion into the Sinai Peninsula enraged Eisenhower, the simultaneous conflicts in Egypt and Hungary proved a boon at the ballot box. Ike had already enjoyed a significant lead over his Democratic challenger, Adlai Stevenson, when the twin crises erupted on the eve of the presidential poll, but he was ideally positioned to benefit from the international turmoil.

As the incumbent, Ike was able to rise above the political fray and act the statesman, holding emergency meetings of the National Security Council and conferring with world leaders. He called for United Nations resolutions and addressed the nation on television. In those final days of the 1956 campaign, Eisenhower was not running for office; he was brokering peace in the Middle East and trying to contain the carnage in Eastern Europe. Stevenson had little choice but to back the president or risk appearing as if he was putting his own electoral ambitions ahead of the national good.

When the votes were tallied on November 6, Eisenhower had won in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history, carrying nearly 60 percent of the popular vote. Even Nixon’s presence on the ticket (the vice president had finally confronted Eisenhower and forced the issue of his renomination) could not dampen the enthusiasm for the president; Ike made significant inroads in the heart of Dixie, giving the Republicans hope that they might one day break the Democratic stranglehold over the South.

With Eisenhower assured of another term in office, the administration no longer had to pander to Symington and the other Air Power hawks. The nearly one-billion-dollar supplemental appropriation for B-52 bombers that the Democrats had pushed through Congress in the run-up to the election had thrown the budget into deficit, and now it was time to balance the books.

Just where the additional B-52 funds would come from became apparent on November 26, when Engine Charlie Wilson announced the Pentagon’s new “roles and missions directive.” The document was aimed at clearly delineating each of the services’ duties and responsibilities, and laying out jurisdictional boundaries for the squabbling chiefs of staff. Bruce Medaris’s heart must have sunk when he read the section pertaining to missile development.

The army had been frozen out. Two hundred miles was the range of the existing Redstone missile. The Jupiter, the ABMA project on which the army had rested its hopes, was effectively being turned over to the air force. To add insult to injury, the air force issued a triumphant statement after the ruling, declaring that “it will be better for the country if the ABMA team were broken up and the individuals filtered out into industry and other organizations.”

Not only had the air force won the IRBM sweepstakes, now it wanted Wernher von Braun and his German colleagues as well. ABMA might well turn out to be the shortest command in Medaris’s colorful career. The irony, he might have reflected, was that Stuart Symington, the man who had set the current fiscal crunch in motion, was the very politician to whom Medaris indirectly owed his first general’s star and his belated promotion to brigadier general. It had been during another set of Senate investigations, back in 1953, that Medaris, then a colonel, had learned the power of public relations. Called to testify about the shortages of munitions and equipment in Korea, Medaris brought a grenade to a Senate Armed Services subcommittee, which he dismantled before the startled and spellbound legislators, to expose its precision parts. “If we let down our standards to speed production,” he explained, “we do so at the peril of our troops who deserve the safest and most effective firepower we can provide.” When confronted with a damning letter from a soldier who had written his mother pleading for her to send him ammunition in her next care package, Medaris, nonplussed, asked to see the document. Flashing a telegenic and slightly roguish smile, he disarmed Symington, who headed the subcommittee, by pointing out that the request was for .32-caliber rounds, which were used for target practice in recreational handguns, and not for military issue. For deflecting congressional criticism away from the army, Medaris within weeks received the promotion that had been denied him for nearly ten years. Politics could give, but it could also take away. Unfortunately, Medaris now ruminated, the air force was proving far more adept at politics than missile development.

The air force, he fumed, was no match for the team of engineers he supervised at ABMA. In fact, it was so short on qualified technical experts that it had been reduced to hiring outside contractors to supervise its existing operations. The Thor program, for instance, was being managed by a recently formed private engineering concern, the Ramo-Woolridge Corporation (later known as TRW). “The lack of a sound, experienced, military-technical organization in the Air Force has been responsible for the technical side of that service becoming almost a slave to the aircraft and associated industries, subject to endless pressure and propaganda,” Medaris wrote angrily years later.

Medaris was convinced that his in-house team had more experience and a more proven track record. But the air force had better political connections, along with the deep-pocketed support of the defense industry. So despite the fact that an early prototype of the Jupiter had just flown 3,000 miles, breaking every U.S. record for distance, height, and speed, it was ABMA that was going to be sacrificed to pay for bombers that could be rendered obsolete by the time they rolled off the assembly line. For this, Medaris partly blamed Eisenhower. “In all honesty, I do not think that the situation has been helped by having a soldier in the White House,” he complained. “Anyone whose personal experience ended shortly after [World War II] cannot hope to be abreast of today’s military needs. Yet having been immensely successful as a theatre commander in a major war, the President is necessarily impressed with his own military knowledge, and less inclined to listen to the advice of today’s military professionals.”

Eisenhower, however, was more attuned to rocketry’s deadly potential than Medaris believed. “Can you picture a war that would be waged with atomic missiles?” the president had asked reporters at a February 8, 1956, press conference. “It would not be war in any recognizable sense.” War was a “contest,” a battle of wits, strategy, and attrition. Missile warfare, Eisenhower lamented, “would just be complete, indiscriminate devastation.” Ike understood the impact of fully developed missiles on any future conflict with the Soviet Union. He was simply in no hurry to rush headlong into what he labeled “race suicide.”

The president was far from the only military man with doubts about modern rockets. The air force itself viewed missiles with extreme skepticism, and the bomber generals who dominated the service preferred the proven over the uncertain. In August 1956, for instance, the air force’s top research and development commander, General Thomas S. Power, warned of a “somewhat distorted and exaggerated picture” of missile capabilities and complained that missiles “cannot cope with contingencies.” And General LeMay openly opposed rockets, which he put at the bottom of his list of military priorities. Missiles, he argued, would gain only a “satisfactory state of reliability” after “long and bitter experience in the field.” Meanwhile, they would draw away funds from badly needed bombers. Another general, Clarence S. Irvine, groused that missiles didn’t have much of a deterrent effect. “I don’t know how to show… teeth with a missile,” he scoffed.

Nor were these isolated views. Virtually all of the air force’s top officers were former bomber commanders or fighter pilots, who saw little glory in sitting in a bunker with a slide rule, pushing launch code sequences. Resistance to missile development within the service was becoming such an issue that Vice Chief of Staff Thomas D. White, in a 1956 speech to the Air War College, warned his subordinates to get with the program.

And so the air force was getting missiles it didn’t even want, while the army, which desperately wanted them, was being left out in the cold. If Medaris thought the system cynical and Eisenhower out of touch, he was savvy enough to keep his grievances private while he still wore the uniform of a major general. One of his top aides, however, felt no such compunction to suffer in silence. Colonel John C. Nickerson had worked on the Jupiter program since its inception. More than anyone else, he had shepherded it through the labyrinth of the military bureaucracy, had nurtured its various stages of technical evolution, and had rallied behind its creators whenever morale flagged. The Jupiter was his project, and he could not bear to see it aborted. “The aircraft industry, and particularly the Douglas Aircraft Co. [which built B-47 long-range bombers under license from Boeing], openly opposes the development of any missile by a government agency,” Nickerson wrote in a lengthy report, which he sent to the aerospace writer Erik Bergaust and the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. “It is suspected that the Wilson memorandum has been heavily influenced by lobbying by this company, and by the Bell Telephone Co.” Bell Laboratories, which had been headed by Donald Quarles for nearly twenty-four years before he became assistant secretary of defense, provided the radio guidance system for the Thor. “Discontinuance of Jupiter,” Nickerson went on, “favors commercially the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors,” which was also one of Thor’s prime contractors.

This was a direct attack on Secretary Wilson, who had started his GM career at AC Spark Plug and had been the division’s president. The accusation implied impropriety at the highest levels of government, and reaction in Washington was swift. Nickerson was arrested, charged with revealing state secrets, court-martialed, and sent to the Panama Canal Zone.

Medaris scrambled desperately to distance himself from the Nickerson debacle, going so far as to testify against him at his trial. But it was too late. The damage had already been done. ABMA had made powerful enemies in Washington, and its future, and that of its star expatriate scientists, looked bleak.

Not for the first time, Wernher von Braun must have wondered if coming to America had been a mistake. After all, he had chosen the United States, among all the countries who had vied for his services, because he had thought that only America had the resources and foresight to pursue rocket technology. Even before the war had ended, von Braun had gathered his key engineers to discuss which Allied nation offered the best hope for continuing their careers. “It was not a big decision,” recalled the physicist Ernst Stuhlinger, one of those present during the defection discussions. “It was very straightforward and immediate. We knew we would not have an enviable fate if the Russians would have captured us.” The French had been discounted as strutting losers. The British had fought bravely, but the United Kingdom was small and no longer the power it had once been. West Germany would have strict limits placed on its military programs. That left only the United States.

But the America that greeted von Braun when he first stepped off a military cargo plane in Wilmington, Delaware, in September 1945 was not the place he had expected. At the time, his mere presence on U.S. soil was deemed sufficiently sensitive that it was kept secret for over a year. He cleared no customs and passed through no formal passport controls. The paper trail documenting his entry was sealed in an army vault, along with his incriminating war files; his Nazi Party ties, his depositions denying his involvement in slave labor, and his three SS promotions remained classified until 1984, seven years after his death. For Colonel Ludy Toftoy and von Braun’s army minders, his past, as well as the even more frightening war record of some of the other scientists, wasn’t an issue. “Screen them for being Nazis?” a senior intelligence officer told the historian Dennis Piszkiewicz, laughing. “What the hell for? Look, [even] if they were Hitler’s brothers, it’s beside the point. Their knowledge is valuable for military and possibly national reasons.” The real concern in postwar Washington was how the transfer of technology from the Third Reich would play out with the general public. The horrors of the Holocaust were still too fresh, the newsreels of liberated concentration camps still too painful for most Americans to accept Germans in their midst. Toftoy needed to find a secluded spot to stash von Braun and his cohorts until the wounds of the Second World War had healed a little. The hideout he selected was Fort Bliss, a desolate army base near El Paso, Texas. It would become von Braun’s less-than-happy home for the next five years.

When Germany’s leading scientists began arriving under military escort at Fort Bliss in the fall of 1945, it is not difficult to imagine the culture shock they must have experienced. Brown dusty plains stretched to the east as far as the eye could see. The desert was unbroken save for the occasional tumbleweed, buzzard, and cactus, and it baked at over a hundred degrees for most of the year. To the west rose the jagged red peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, or Christ’s Blood, Mountains. To the south ran the Rio Grande and the squalid pueblos of Mexico. At night, an impregnable blackness descended over the land, Stuhlinger recalled. And during the day, the hot Texas sky broiled a deep blue completely alien to any European.

“To my continental eyes,” von Braun later confessed, “the sight was overwhelming and grandiose, but at the same time I felt in my heart that I would find it very difficult ever to develop a genuine emotional attachment to such a merciless landscape.”

Fort Bliss, an old cavalry outpost built around the rough adobe walls of a border citadel, offered little respite from the inhospitable terrain. Low, ramshackle “rat shack” two-story barracks, made mostly of plywood, sat on the sand. A half-empty hospital building dominated the grounds, along with a few disused hangars and single-story structures connected by gravel pathways. Chain-link fences cut off the German compound from the rest of the base.

Fort Bliss was a far cry from the resplendent accommodations von Braun had grown accustomed to in his German headquarters on the island of Peenemünde, where the sand was confined to pleasant beaches, his sailboat and personal Messerschmitt plane were always at the ready, and the maître d’ at the research center’s four-star Schwabes Hotel stocked the wine cellar with the finest vintages seized from France. The restaurant’s embossed china, fine silverware, and elaborate dining protocols had astounded the Soviets when they occupied Peenemünde. “A line of waiters in black suits, white shirts, and bow-ties marched in solemn procession around the table,” Boris Chertok recalled. “In this process, the first waiter ladled soup, the second placed a potato, the third showered the plates with greens, the fourth drizzled on a piquant gravy, and finally the fifth trickled about 30 grams of alcohol into one of the numerous goblets… a scene that to us was familiar only from movies.” The quality of the ingredients, alas, had deteriorated by the time the Red Army arrived. “I served the best wines,” the maître d’hôtel had apologized to his new Communist customers. But when “von Braun evacuated Peenemünde, they took all the food and wine stores with them.”

At Fort Bliss, snakes slithered around the cinder-block footings of the mess hall, where cooks in greasy T-shirts slopped something called grub on tin trays. (Complaints about American cuisine figured prominently in the first published press reports revealing Germans in El Paso. The scathing comments of Walther Riedel, von Braun’s chief design engineer, earned him a subheading in a December 1946 article: “German Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken.”) The revelation that von Braun’s team was in the country in turn prompted impassioned complaints. On December 30, 1946, Albert Einstein and the Federation of American Scientists wrote to President Truman, arguing, “We hold these individuals to be potentially dangerous carriers of racial and religious hatred. Their former eminence as Nazi party members and supporters raises the issue of their fitness to become American citizens and hold key positions in American industrial, scientific and educational institutions.” Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan (whose son holds his congressional seat today), went even further: “I never thought we were so poor mentally in this country that we have to import those Nazi killers.”

For von Braun, Einstein’s rebuke must have particularly stung. As a teenager in Germany, he had worshiped the theoretical physicist and had written to him, showing his own mathematical equations for spaceflight. Einstein had responded encouragingly, saying that von Braun would make a fine engineer. Now the Nobel laureate was questioning whether von Braun was even fit to be a citizen, much less a scientist.

American citizenship, though, was still far down the pike for von Braun and his German compatriots. As wards of the army, von Braun’s group was confined to a six-acre section of the base, kept isolated from other Fort Bliss personnel, and allowed no contact with the local population. “Daily life was quite regulated due to security requirements,” recalled Colonel William Winterstein, one of von Braun’s early military minders. “The dread that any of the German team may become involved in a public disturbance or accident hung over our heads at all times during those days before it was announced officially that they were in the United States.”

Eventually, the restrictions were loosened. In 1947, the thirty-five-year-old von Braun was allowed to return briefly to Germany—accompanied by armed guards—to marry his seventeen-and-a-half-year-old cousin, Maria. At Fort Bliss, security also gradually eased. Once a month, and then once a week, the Germans were bused to El Paso in escorted groups of four to spend a leisurely Saturday afternoon. They were issued IDs that read: “SPECIAL WAR DEPARTMENT EMPLOYEE. In the event that this card is presented off a military reservation to civilian authorities… it is requested that this office be notified immediately… and the bearer of this card NOT be interrogated.” The message was clear; the Germans were the property of the U.S. Army. And only under the supervision of armed MPs could they catch a screening of Zorro at the Palace Theatre, go shopping at the Popular Dry Goods Company Department Store, have lunch at the Hotel Cortez, or drink a beer at the Acme Saloon beneath sepia-toned photos of old gunslingers. The outlaw spirit of Wyatt Earp was very much alive in El Paso in the 1940s, and the place still had the rough-and-tumble feel of a frontier town. The streets were dusty and only partly paved. Pickup trucks and the occasional horse-drawn cart plied North Mesa Avenue. Pioneer Plaza swarmed with itinerant farmhands and migrant workers from Mexico. And the Parlor House bar district saw its fair share of fistfights between roughnecks and ranchers, freewheeling businessmen and fire-breathing preachers, who served notice on sinners from tow-away churches in mobile homes.

Wernher von Braun was not a natural fit in this mix. Born to an aristocratic family in 1912, he had been raised on estates in Silesia and East Prussia and in the family residence in Berlin. His father had served as a minister in the government that Hitler toppled. His mother, the Baroness Emmy von Quistorp, was of Swedish noble lineage, spoke six languages, and had been raised in England as a Renaissance woman with interests in astronomy and classical music. She passed her passion for astral and orchestral movements on to her son, who by the age of six had composed his first piano concerto and received his first telescope. In Peenemünde, which von Braun had selected as a research center based on the baroness’s recommendation, he pursued his love of music, playing cello in a string quartet of rocket scientists. His group had had its own private chamber in the Officers’ Club, Stuhlinger remembered: “His cello was accompanied by Rudolf Hermann’s and Heinrich Ramm’s violins, and by Gerhard Reisig’s viola, when the four of them played works by Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert.”

At Fort Bliss, the Officers’ Club was off-limits to the Germans. They had to build their own clubhouse in a storage shed, stocking it with homemade furniture and a bar they cobbled together from spare planks. Sometimes von Braun’s brother Magnus, who had been a supervisor at Mittelwerk, played the accordion. At other times, after a few rounds of tequila, when the monotony, seclusion, and language lessons got to them, they crept through a hole in the fence to look at the stars in the desert sky. “Prisoners of peace” was how they referred to themselves. But at least they were out of reach of the prosecutors and the war crimes tribunals in Europe that were meting out justice for the slaughter of slave laborers at Mittelwerk, among a host of other Nazi atrocities.

A year, and then two, passed aimlessly. Resources at Fort Bliss were as rare as rain. Only $47 million had been allocated in 1947 for total U.S. missile development, and that left precious little for the Germans. Fort Bliss’s miserly quartermaster turned down a request by von Braun’s brother for linoleum to cover the cracks between boards in the wood floor of the hut where delicate gyroscopes were assembled. He also denied a requisition for a high-speed drill. “Frankly, we were disappointed,” von Braun recalled years later. “At Peenemünde we had been coddled. Here you were counting pennies… and everyone wanted military expenditures curtailed.”

Von Braun bubbled with ideas for new rockets. But his every proposal was shot down. Nor was anyone particularly interested in his ideas for space travel either. He sent a manuscript on exploring Mars to eighteen publishers in New York, and eighteen rejection letters wended their way back to the Fort Bliss postmaster. Adding insult to injury, von Braun now had to report to a twenty-six-year-old major whose sole technical background was an undergraduate engineering degree. When von Braun was twenty-six, thousands of engineers had answered to him. His loyal Germans still insisted on calling him Herr Professor out of respect. But his pimply new American boss, Major Jim Hamill, addressed him as Wernher and didn’t even bother to respond to most of his plaintive memos requesting more materials. Just tinker with your old V-2s was the standing order from Colonel Toftoy in Washington. “We’ll put you on ice,” Stuhlinger recalled Hamill saying. “We may need you later on.”

The U.S. government had gone through a great deal of trouble to ensure that no other power acquired the services of Nazi Germany’s rocket elite. Retaining “control of German individuals who might contribute to the revival of German war potential in foreign countries,” as a State Department memo inelegantly put it, had been the primary justification for the 1947 decision to make von Braun’s temporary stay in America more permanent. Even if the United States didn’t need him right now, Washington wanted to make certain no one else got his expertise. Due to their “threat to world security,” the Germans couldn’t be repatriated. To a frustrated von Braun, it seemed that the United States had dumped him and his team in deepest Texas and forgotten all about them. “We were distrusted aliens living in what for us was a desolate region of a foreign land,” he recalled. “Nobody seemed much interested in work that smelled of weapons.”

Von Braun might have languished indefinitely under the hot Texas sun if not for the actions of two men: Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and North Korea’s Communist leader, Kim II Sung.

McCarthy’s Red-baiting reign of terror—when everyone from J. Robert Oppenheimer to what seemed like half of Hollywood was accused of Communist sympathies—inadvertently helped to rehabilitate von Braun. The only skeletons in his closet were Nazi skeletons, and the Reich was yesterday’s enemy. Berlin was no longer the seat of evil. The divided city had been transformed into a symbol of freedom by the massive airlift orchestrated by Symington and LeMay in 1948, when three hundred thousand sorties were flown, delivering food and medicine during Stalin’s yearlong siege of West Berlin. The cold war by then had begun in earnest, and a new adversary had replaced fascism as an ideological threat to the American way of life.

The threat was magnified a thousandfold the following year, when Moscow detonated its first atomic bomb. The era, grumbled LeMay, “when we might have completely destroyed Russia and not even skinned our elbows doing it” was over. A few months later, the revolutionary cancer spread to China, further whipping up domestic paranoia in the United States. Suddenly, any American who had ever attended a Marxist meeting in the 1930s, or dated someone who had, was potentially a security risk. Immigrant scientists, with their top-secret clearances and Eastern European backgrounds, were especially vulnerable. After Mao’s victory, the blacklist was expanded to include Chinese-born American researchers. Tsien Hsue-shen, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech and a pioneer in the field of American rocketry, was arrested and deported to China. (Documents would later reveal that he had been innocent of the spying charges, prompting one military historian to call the affair the “greatest act of stupidity of the McCarthyist period…. China now has nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States in large part because of Tsien.”)

Von Braun, however, was above reproach. For five years the FBI and army intelligence had monitored his every move, read his correspondence, and listened to his telephone conversations. Nothing more untoward than the suspect sale of some undeclared silver by his brother Magnus had ever been uncovered. By the summer of 1950, the political climate had changed sufficiently enough for von Braun to come out of purgatory. What’s more, his services were finally needed again. On the night of June 25, 1950, Kim II Sung’s North Korean forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, threatening to overrun South Korea. This time President Truman decided to draw the line. Three weeks later von Braun received his first meaningful commission, the Redstone.

With the assignment came a change of address and a new lease on life for von Braun and his team. Compared to Fort Bliss, Huntsville seemed idyllic. The historic hamlet was home to fifteen thousand genteel southerners, and its proud Civil War heritage was etched in the Confederate Monument that crowned the town square. White clapboard church spires dominated the skyline, and the sidewalks were trimmed with white picket fences and immaculately groomed lawns. White was the dominant color in Huntsville, as it was in all of Madison County, Alabama, and throughout the entire Jim Crow South. But the civil rights movement was beginning to take root in 1950, and this worried some of the town’s newest German residents. “We had some concerns here,” Wernher Dahm recalled. “Not so much about segregation… as about open strife.”

Huntsville wasn’t perfect. But after wandering in the desert for five years, von Braun and his crew had finally found a home. They now had regular salaries, as opposed to the six dollars a day they had received during their first days in Texas, and they had complete freedom of movement. Their legal status had been “normalized,” thanks to some creative immigration paperwork, and they would be eligible for U.S. citizenship in a few years. Meanwhile, they could buy cars, houses, motorboats, and televisions; in short, they could enjoy all the material benefits of the American dream.

Life was looking up for von Braun. He bought a fashionable new rambler on a large hilly lot on McClung Street just outside Huntsville’s historic city center. His wife, Maria, gave birth to two daughters, Margrit and Iris. The Redstone performed flawlessly during its 1953 tests, and Walt Disney came calling the following year with an intriguing television offer.

Disney was putting together a weekly television program to promote the new theme park he was building on 160 acres of orange groves in Anaheim, California. The show, like the amusement park, would be called Disneyland, and each week would feature a theme from one of the park’s four attractions: Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland. The fledgling ABC network was backing the venture with $4.5 million in loan guarantees to Disney personally. No one else had wanted to put up the money, not even Disney’s brother Roy, who ran the business side of the animation studio. But Walt Disney had run the numbers. Americans had given birth in droves after the war, and their children were now clamoring for entertainment. The country’s Gross Domestic Product had almost doubled over the past decade, thanks in part to the industrial ramp-up for war production and America’s subsequent competitive advantage over the decimated European economies. The boom had even trickled down to minimum-wage earners, whose hourly pay in 1954 had just been increased from seventy cents to a dollar, giving consumers at the bottom of the scale a little extra to spend on vacations. That year, for the first time in history, airlines had supplanted both rail and ships as the primary mode of transcontinental and transatlantic traffic, making travel less time-consuming. And the explosion of cars on American roads made it more affordable for the masses. For Disney, it all added up to one thing: a tourism boom. All he needed were telegenic hosts for his Sunday night Disneyland infomercials on ABC. The actor Ronald Reagan would handle the grand opening. Was the handsome von Braun interested in hosting the “Man in Space” segments of the Tomorrowland programs?

It was thus from the odd pairing of Mickey Mouse and a former SS major with a Teutonic Texas twang that most Americans first heard of the futuristic concept of an earth-orbiting satellite. Disney himself introduced the inaugural Tomorrowland program on March 9, 1955. “In our modern world,” he declared, “everywhere we look we see the influence science has on our daily lives. Discoveries that were miracles a few short years ago are accepted as commonplace today. Many of the things that seem impossible now will become realities tomorrow.” The Milky Way briefly replaced Disney on the screen. “One of man’s oldest dreams has been the desire to travel in space. Until recently this seemed to be an impossibility. But new discoveries have brought us on the threshold of a new frontier.”

The show attracted 42 million viewers and made von Braun a star. With his youthful good looks, broad shoulders, and perfect blend of boyish enthusiasm and European erudition, von Braun quickly became America’s space prophet, a televangelist leading audiences on the scientific conquest of distant planets. The country was enthralled by the endless possibilities unleashed by jet travel and the splitting of the atom. Modernism swept architecture, automobile, and furniture design, where styles were sharp, angular, and edgy. Engine Charlie’s General Motors incorporated the fast, futuristic themes in its famous Motorama car shows, which featured Delta-wing designs, high fins, and space-bubble taillights. Cool, crisp colors announced the new era: pale greens, baby blues, pastel yellows, and deep, pile-rug whites. Earth tones were out; glass and stainless steel were in. At the movies, aliens reigned as Invaders from Mars and War of the Worlds dominated the box office. In fashion, the look was tapered, sleek, and hurried. In music, the new sound was rushed, the rapid-fire rhythm of rock and roll. Speed was the essence of the jet age, and it found expression even in the national diet. In 1955, the entrepreneur Ray Kroc franchised his first two McDonald’s restaurants. He called them fast-food outlets.

The Disney series had tapped into this headlong dash toward the future and inflamed the imagination of Americans in much the same way that the writings of Hermann Oberth and the films of Fritz Lang had ignited the amateur rocketry craze in Germany in the late 1920s that eventually produced the V-2. But the space craze that swept the nation in the mid-1950s did not translate into political support for space programs. Lawmakers had more earthbound and immediate concerns. Space was the distant domain of dreamers and science fiction writers.

Until 1954, cumulative federal spending on satellite research in the United States amounted to $88,000. And even this sum was thought excessive. When von Braun that same year offered to launch a satellite using a modified Redstone missile for less than $100,000, his request for the additional funding was flatly denied. If money was any indication of political interest, satellite and space exploration did not even register on radar screens in the nation’s capital until 1955, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences announced that it would try to send a craft into orbit as part of the planned International Geophysical Year. (The pledge was meaningless, however, until Khrushchev and the Presidium got on board the following year.)

The IGY was a science Olympics of sorts that had its origins in the nineteenth-century Arctic exploration races. Held every fifty years to encourage scientific exchange on the physical properties of the polar regions, it had expanded its brief to cover the planet’s skies, oceans, and ice caps. A few weeks prior to the IGY’s 1955 convention in Rome, which set July 1, 1957, as the start of the next Geophysical Year, Radio Moscow announced that the Soviet Union would launch scientific instruments into space to measure such phenomena as solar radiation and cosmic rays. In response, the National Academy of Sciences promptly declared that the United States would also send up a satellite to study the earth’s protective cocoon. “The atmosphere of the earth acts as a huge shield against many types of radiation and objects that are found in outer space,” the academy press release stated, somewhat dryly. “In order to acquire data that are presently unavailable, it is most important that scientists be able to place instruments outside the earth’s atmosphere in such a way that they can make continuing records about the various properties about which information is desired.”

Behind the seemingly benign facade of the announcements, both the United States and the Soviet Union had ulterior motives for participating in the IGY. Each was looking for a peaceful, civilian excuse to test the military potential of its hardware—how air drag, gravitational fields, and ion content could affect missile trajectories; how the ionosphere affected communications; how orbital decay worked; and so on. There was another, equally important consideration: a research satellite blessed by the international scientific community would set the precedent for an “open skies” policy where sovereign airspace did extend beyond the stratosphere. This, more than anything, argued James Killian at the Office of Defense Mobilization, justified the military’s support for the IGY program.

Killian was among only a handful of people in Washington in 1955 who grasped the true significance of a satellite. Engine Charlie Wilson was not one of them. Killian said that the secretary of defense displayed a “narrowly limited understanding” of the new technology and balked at backing the project. Eventually a compromise was struck in which Congress allocated $13 million—roughly the cost of two B-52 bombers—for America’s entry into the space race. The funding was hopelessly inadequate, and Nelson A. Rockefeller, another Eisenhower adviser, urged that the administration take satellites more seriously. “I am impressed,” he wrote in a widely circulated memorandum, “by the costly consequences of allowing the Russian initiative to outrun ours through an achievement that will symbolize scientific and technological advancement to people everywhere. The stake of prestige that is involved makes this a race we cannot afford to lose.” The “unmistakable relationship,” Rockefeller added ominously, “to intercontinental ballistic missile technology might have important repercussions on the political determination of free world countries to resist communist threats.”

But Eisenhower didn’t bite. For him, nuclear bombers were a sufficient stick to keep the Soviets in line. Khrushchev’s secret speech, in fact, would be interpreted by the CIA as proof that the existing American doctrine was working. “It must be restated, and it cannot be emphasized too strongly,” the CIA said of Khrushchev’s break with Stalinism, “that recognition by the Soviet leaders of the significance of nuclear weapons is the underlying cause for their policy shift. For the present, the atom and jet are the basic deterrent.”

Bombers had actually scared the Kremlin into softening its stand—“mellowing,” as the agency put it. Satellites, therefore, were trivial in the superpower rivalry. Eisenhower declared that he felt no need “to compete with the Soviets in this area.” Secretary Wilson told the New York Times that he too was unconcerned about the prospect of Russia reaching space first. “I wouldn’t care if they did,” he said.