Rocket Girl by George D. Morgan

Author:George D. Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2013-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

“Rockets are large, rockets are small,

If you get a good one, give us a call.”

—DANIEL G. MAZUR, MANAGER, VANGUARD OPERATIONS GROUP1

In America, Wernher von Braun had two things the Soviet Union could never offer Sergei Korolev: Collier's and Walt Disney.

In the early 1950s, von Braun wrote a series of articles for Collier's Weekly about the possibility of human space travel and what it would take to achieve it. With a circulation of four million, the Collier's articles made a deep impact on the consciousness of the country, galvanizing the public's imagination in the same way von Braun had been influenced as a young man by the novels of Jules Verne.2 The attention of the American public became riveted on the very real possibility that Verne's outlandish stories might become science fact. It had already happened with the invention of Verne's submarine, why not rockets to the moon?

On the strength of the Collier's articles, Walt Disney asked von Braun to make some appearances on his new television show, Man in Space.3 For Disney there were very real commercial reasons for this, including his desire to promote Tomorrowland in the recently opened Disneyland.4 But Walt Disney had personal reasons as well, not the least of which were the boyhood fantasies that had imagined Disneyland in the first place. Walt Disney, like many Americans, was excited about the future of space travel. The addition of von Braun's appearances on the show describing what human space travel would be like soon had the imaginations of the American public firing on all cylinders. Thus began a public-relations campaign on the part of von Braun to get the country philosophically attuned to his frequency: that human space travel was our destiny, and since the technology already existed to achieve it, we ought to get started.

All this von Braun–centric publicity created a quiet breech in the nation's space focus—a breech so subtle almost no one was aware of it at first. On the one hand, the US government had begun work designing large rockets that might one day be capable of manned flight, while on the other hand, they had assigned von Braun to rocket projects intended as non-orbital weapons. The situation was like telling the quarterback of the championship football team he was not allowed into the stadium.

Several years later, when Vanguard rockets were failing and exploding, the philosophical breech in American rocket policy would suddenly lurch into the open. As Eisenhower and his minions scratched their heads over why the people wanted their heads on a platter, the stadium roared for its quarterback. It was one of the first illustrations of how television, though still in its infancy, would come to mold public policy—the policymakers be damned. All of that was yet in the future. For now, Disney's weekly television show helped Americans, and many people around the world, come to know Wernher von Braun as a warm, friendly neighbor. As Madison Avenue wonks might say, Wernher von Braun became a household name.5

And through all of this, Sergei Korolev was full of envy.

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