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By Root 574 0

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