Wheels in the Sky

Many of these details were devised by von Braun, but the concept of a spinning wheel-shaped space station had been thought of before.

In the 1928 book The Problem of Space Travel, Herman Potocnik laid out detailed plans for a wheel-like space station that he called the "Habitat Wheel."

In 1926, when he was 14 years old, von Braun found inspiration in German physicist Hermann Oberth's The Rocket Into Planetary Space. (Just four years later, von Braun would be working as an assistant to Oberth in his rocket program.) The science fiction works of Jules Verne, such as From the Earth to the Moon, also inspired the young von Braun, according to Wright. That story was published in English in 1873.

Stanley Kubrick's movie 2001: A Space Odyssey popularized the idea of space stations in the Apollo and post-Apollo eras, but fictional accounts of a space station appear as early as 1869, when Edward Everett Hale published a story called The Brick Moon. In that story, Hale depicted a manned satellite that functioned as a navigational aide to ships at sea. Before that, fantasies about traveling in space date back as early as the second century, when the Greek rhetorician Lucian wrote an account of a voyage to the Moon.

But while space travel and space stations had appeared frequently in writings of science fiction and scientific speculation, von Braun brought charisma and political savvy to the cause.

"He was revolutionary in his science and his engineering, but he was also revolutionary in this approach of going directly to the public," Wright said. "Von Braun said we (scientists) can publish scientific papers and treatises until hell freezes over, but if we don't get the attention of the tax payer, we're not going anywhere."

The first sentence of the 1952 Collier's article certainly got people's attention. In the shadow of the growing Cold War, von Braun began his space prophecy:

"Within the next 10 or 15 years, 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."

Certainly von Braun would have been happy to see that one of his dreams -- the International Space Station -- is finally becoming a reality. Best of all, the space station of 2000 is not a weapon of war, as von Braun feared, but an unprecedented cooperative effort of 16 nations including the United States and Russia.