Not surprising given the tenor of the time, NASA gave no consideration to women as astronaut candidates. Despite the example of Jacqueline Cochran, who had set a series of historical firsts during a career as a military and air-race pilot, no woman in the United States had been granted an opportunity to gain experience as either a combat or test pilot. But provocative speculation never hurt sales, so the question of whether a woman might fly in space, and when, often arose in popular magazines. In reality, it was a non-issue, and NASA avoided public statements that would only exacerbate controversy.
When Real, a publication that advertised itself as “the Exciting Magazine for Men,” had considered the question in 1958, it concluded that women would indeed have a place on lengthy future space missions—as crew members willing to ease the strong sexual urge of men in the prime of life. The author, Martin Caidin, who became a fixture among the Cape Canaveral press corps during the next decade, attempted to make his argument by considering the alternative: “If you ignore the problem, you’re letting yourself in for emotional dynamite and homosexuality—and that is not acceptable.” In a similar vein, whenever von Braun was asked a question about the possibility of women serving as astronauts, he usually responded with a wry smile and a prepared answer: “We have talked about adding provisions in the space capsule for one hundred twenty pounds of recreational equipment.”
The seven smiling men pictured wearing sports shirts and crew cuts in the pages of Life magazine quickly eclipsed the celebrity of America’s most famous rocket man. When, shortly after their press conference, the astronauts visited Huntsville to see the rockets under development, von Braun said publicly that he found them wonderful people, “serious, sober, dedicated, and balanced.” But behind the scenes during the visit, von Braun and General Medaris were still trying to determine the fate of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency.
Von Braun’s newest project was the Saturn, a cleverly improvised design for a large, heavy-lifting booster. Built from existing component parts, the huge rocket’s first stage was composed of a cluster of eight individual cylindrical Redstone rocket-size fuel tanks—each eighty feet high and five feet in diameter—surrounding a single, slightly larger Jupiter rocket tank. Five of the tanks, including the Jupiter tank in the center, carried liquid oxygen; the remaining four carried kerosene. Together, the Saturn’s six engines would produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust, enough to place a payload of ten thousand to forty thousand pounds into low earth orbit. While the Department of Defense and the Advanced Research Projects Agency had been planning large reconnaissance satellites, von Braun was thinking of other possible uses. He knew that if he could obtain funding to produce a small yet very powerful heavy-lifting booster and demonstrate its ability, the decision makers in Washington were more likely to approve the design of the next, slightly larger model. By progressing in steps to bigger and more powerful vehicles, he would eventually produce one capable of taking men to the Moon, an option von Braun was always working toward, even though no one in Washington was talking seriously about such an undertaking.
NASA’s civilian man-in-space program was planning to use the military’s Redstone, Atlas, and Titan missiles for the early missions, but any ambitious later projects involving a space station or leaving earth orbit would require a bigger heavy-lifting rocket. Von Braun’s Saturn now seemed the likely workhorse for NASA’s longer-term future. With Eisenhower’s consent, the Army’s entire rocket development-operations division in Huntsville was brought under NASA’s umbrella as its rocket-development facility. Renamed the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, it became the agency’s largest facility when the transfer took place on July 1, 1960. For the first time in more than a quarter of a century, von Braun would no longer be working for a branch of the military. And his lifelong ambition to design the rockets that would take humans into the heavens was now a reality.
While von Braun’s future with the Army was still under discussion, his past was being recreated on a Munich movie-studio soundstage. Columbia Pictures was producing I Aim at the Stars, a dramatic biopic intended to tell von Braun’s odyssey from a rocket visionary in Nazi Germany to an American hero. Playing von Braun was German actor Curd Jürgens, a familiar face from other recent Hollywood productions. British filmmaker J. Lee Thompson had intended the movie to address questions about the social responsibility of a modern scientist and what constitutes a war criminal, but these moral issues were lost in a screenplay that focused on telling an inaccurate and sanitized version of von Braun’s life. When the film opened in London, Munich, and New York, protesters handed out “Ban the Bomb” leaflets and displayed placards denouncing von Braun as a Nazi. However, the most bruising attack came from movie critics, and the film disappeared from movie theaters just as the final days of the 1960 presidential election were playing out on home screens. By the decade’s end, 88 percent of American homes had televisions. In addition to the novelty of the nation’s first televised presidential debates, the 1960 election marked a turning point in American politics, as the power of the image proved as crucial as the candidates’ spoken words.
This was the first presidential election in which both candidates had been born during the twentieth century. Both had also served with distinction during World War II—one returning as a war hero who had saved lives. For those who had fought in the North Atlantic, in Europe, in the Pacific, and in Korea, the election of 1960 marked a dramatic generational shift.
Watching the campaign from Huntsville, one World War II veteran saw something of himself in John Kennedy. Like the Massachusetts senator, von Braun had been born to privilege and wealth and, with a combination of charisma, intelligence, and persuasive rhetoric, had risen to national prominence. Hungry for a change after the cautious policies of the Eisenhower White House, von Braun thought Kennedy might be the right person to usher in the dawning age of human space travel. Kennedy was not afraid of making bold decisions, such as his choice to ignore the advice of campaign strategists and help secure the release of Martin Luther King, Jr., from an Atlanta jail cell during the final week of the campaign.
Von Braun and his wife went to their local Huntsville polling place on Election Day and cast their ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate.
As his second term was nearing its end, President Eisenhower was determined to deliver a final message to the American people. He had been contemplating the content of his farewell address for nearly two years and had labored over more than twenty drafts before appearing in front of live television cameras three days before the inauguration of the thirty-fifth occupant of the executive office. Considered by many the most important speech of his presidency, Eisenhower’s televised farewell famously voiced a warning about the increasing influence of the American military-industrial complex. In it he expressed respect for scientific discovery and the ways in which technology could improve lives, but he called equal attention to the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Eisenhower subsequently declined to elaborate in public about what specifically led him to make this speech. But some months later in a private conversation, a noted nuclear physicist asked the former president whether he had anyone in mind when he mentioned the scientific-technological elite.
Eisenhower answered without