THE JOURNAL OF ASTROSOCIOLOGY VOLUME 1

German rocket pioneers Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley were science advisors on the film. As apublicity stunt, Lang hired Oberth and Ley to build a real rocket to launch, timed to coincidewith the film’s opening. The rocket project did not succeed in building a rocket in time for thefilm, but Oberth and Ley continued their work with the German amateur rocket club Verein fürRaumschiffahrt (VfR – literally the “Club for Space-ship travel”), launching their first liquid fuelrocket in early 1930. Wernher von Braun joined the VfR at about this time, and by 1934, thegroup was launching liquid-fueled rockets to altitudes of over 3 km.With World War II, of course, the German rocket group led by von Braun built a series ofrockets leading to the Vergeltungswaffe 2 (V-2), the first rocket to be built on an industrial scale,used for long-range bombing of England and the Netherlands. Reputedly, von Braun's commenton the news of the successful use of the V-2 for bombing London was: “The rocket workedperfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.”The V-2 brought the reality of rockets public in a highly visible way; rockets were nolonger comic-strip stuff, but real and highly-visible tools of warfare and, presumably,spaceflight. Following the end of the war, the rockets on science fiction magazine and coversnow all looked remarkably like the V-2, and science fiction entered a golden age, withspaceflight stories written by a number of classic writers such as Robert Heinlein, Arthur C.Clarke (who was also noted for inventing the concept of a geosynchronous communicationssatellite), Isaac Asimov, and Andre Norton reaching new audiences.Figure 8: After the public exposure of the V-2 rocket in WorldWar II, the rockets seen in science-fiction cover art began todevelop a marked resemblance to the V-2.© 2015 Astrosociology Research Institute63