Wernher von Braun became the biggest celebrity of the Operation Paperclip scientists. By 1950, the army decided that it required a much larger facility to research and develop longer-range rockets, so the Fort Bliss rocket team moved from Texas to the Redstone Arsenal, near Huntsville, Alabama. There, the German scientists began work on the army’s Jupiter ballistic missile. The group had launched sixty-four V-2s from White Sands. At the same time, von Braun was ambitiously developing a persona for himself as America’s prophet of space travel. Rockets, outer space, and interplanetary travel had gained a foothold in American culture. It was the dream of many 1950s American children to fly into outer space, and von Braun and Dornberger became national spokesmen on this issue. They promised the nation that the army’s development of a ballistic missile was the necessary first step in reaching outer space.
In 1952, von Braun experienced a breakthrough in his role of national space advocate when Collier’s magazine paid him $4,000 (approximately $36,000 in 2013) to write the lead article in what would eventually become an eight-part series on future space travel, edited by Cornelius Ryan. “Within the next 10 or 15 years,” von Braun wrote, “the earth will have a new companion in the skies, a man-made satellite that could be either the greatest force for peace ever devised, or one of the most terrible weapons of war—depending on who makes and controls it.” This space satellite, or station, would also be a “terribly effective atomic bomb carrier,” von Braun added. From its earliest days, space travel would be intertwined with war making. It still is.
In addition to earning von Braun a small fortune, the Collier’s magazine series propelled him into the national spotlight, increasing his fame and affording him additional writing opportunities. Most important, this newfound limelight provided von Braun with a platform to recast himself as a patriotic American. In the summer of 1952, American Magazine published a piece with von Braun’s byline entitled “Why I Chose America,” in which he professed a deep love for America, Christianity, and democracy. In the article, von Braun claimed that during the war he opposed Nazism and was never in a position to do anything but follow orders. The piece earned him an award for “patriotic writing,” even though it had been written by a ghostwriter. The article was reprinted in at least one book and, explains Michael J. Neufeld, would thereafter be “taken as a fundamental source by many later journalists and authors.”
The national attention caught the eye of Walt Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, and an executive called von Braun to see if he wanted to film a couple of space-related shows for a new television series that Disney was working on. For over a year, von Braun had been trying to find a New York publisher for the science fiction novel he had written while living in the Texas desert. By this time, the novel had been rejected by eighteen publishers. The Disney contract offered a wider road to fame and von Braun signed on. The first Disneyland TV broadcast in which von Braun appeared, in 1955, called Man in Space, had an estimated 42 million viewers and was reported to be the second-highest-rated television show in American history at the time. The following month, on April 15, 1955, von Braun and many of his fellow German rocket scientists became U.S. citizens, in a public ceremony held in the Huntsville High School auditorium. In 1958, von Braun and his team launched America’s first successful space satellite, Explorer I, as a quick response to the Soviets’ Sputnik. Kurt Debus was in charge of the launch.