Part 3: Liberation

The Nazi Rocketeers are sent to work on the Apollo program in Huntsville, Alabama during the 1960s, in the midst of the civil rights struggle. Exactly 100 years after the conflagrations of the Civil War and the long struggle of African-Americans for freedom, Huntsville is the epicenter of two pathologically divergent impulses in the nation: the maniacal will to achieve the impossible goal of landing men on the moon, and the savage resistance to the equally impossible goal of integrating a lunch counter. David McCadden, an avid, young astronomer and spaceflight enthusiast, becomes the first black student to integrate the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1962, and is hired by NASA to work in the Apollo program alongside Rudolph and von Braun. Played on a vast field of cotton, this story is the fulcrum of two heretofore separate histories of America—the space race and the Civil Rights struggle—as they collide on the stage, to reveal larger meanings about our intentions as a nation, and shine new light on its perilous and exalted coming-of-age.