Trivia

According to the American Film Institute: "The film was greeted with demonstrations against von Braun at showings in Europe and New York, according to various news stories. Prior to the world premiere in Munich, von Braun and Jurgens held a press conference during which members of the Communist and British press hounded von Braun with charges that the film whitewashed his war work. The press conference prompted von Braun to issue the following statement: 'I have very deep and sincere regrets for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides. A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war.' Later, a crowd of protesters mobbed the theater where the premiere was held. Demonstrators in London dropped anti-Nazi pamphlets onto theatergoers from a balcony. In New York, the film was picketed by an anti-Fascist youth organization. The film was previewed in Washington at the Senate Office auditorium, and its Oct 1960 opening in Washington was attended by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The film was chosen to open the Edinburgh Film Festival, where it received a special diploma of merit."

Upon the movie's release in the United Kingdom, satirists began appending the film's title on advertising posters to: I Aim for the Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London). A sarcastic joke highlighting von Braun's role in the Nazi V-Weapon program.

This was producer Charles H. Schneer's last American film. He would move to London for the rest of his film producing career, most prominently with special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen.

It is not made clear in this film that Wernher von Braun was an active Nazi, a party member (something he always denied, aided by his American employers, who deliberately suppressed this information in his lifetime) and an honorary colonel in the S.S. He not only used slave labor in building his rockets in Germany, he insisted on it.

German-born Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) was one of the first researchers and developers in the rocketry field and an early proponent of space exploration from the 1930s through the early 1970s. During the 1930s von Braun was a leader of the German rocket team that later developed the V-2 ballistic missile at a secret laboratory in Peenemünde, Germany, at the request of the German military. In 1945, as it became obvious that Germany was going to lose WW II, von Braun negotiated the surrender of 500 of his fellow scientists, along with plans and rocket prototypes, to the American troops. Von Braun and his scientists were settled at Fort Bliss, Texas, where they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army. Later they worked at the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. In 1960, he was appointed as director at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He became the chief designer and developer of the Saturn V launch vehicle, a super-rocket that propelled NASA astronauts to the moon.