Wheels in the Sky

The public enthusiasm sparked by the shows and the Collier's article, which ran 4 million copies, is considered a turning point in the American pursuit of space travel by some historians.

"Von Braun (caused) a great shift in public opinion in terms of space flight," said Mike Wright, historian for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., where von Braun conducted much of his work.

"(He moved) that view of peaceful space exploration -- the idea of going to other planets -- into the realm of a potential, of a reality," Wright said.

People took von Braun's predictions very seriously, Wright said. After all, von Braun was the technical director for the Army Ordnance Guided Missiles Development Group at the time, and later became the director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

In other words, he knew what he was talking about.

Still, von Braun's space station concept looks considerably different from the International Space Station's design.

While the ISS resembles something constructed from an Erector Set, the paintings in the Collier's article look more like the space station in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Shaped like a wheel with two spokes, von Braun's space station would spin like a carnival ride to create centrifugal force that would act as a false gravity. Inside the wheel, three decks would provide room for the communications equipment, earth observatories, military control centers, weather forecasting centers, navigational equipment, living space and mercury-vapor power generating turbines that would facilitate the many functions that von Braun imagined the station would perform.