His work in nuclear rocket propulsion earned him the 1979 Hermann Oberth Gold Medal of the Wernher von Braun International Space Flight Foundation[1][2][3] and a 1981 citation by the Nevada Legislature.

[8] According to his faculty webpage, in 1954 he "made the first proposal to test general relativity with atomic clocks in earth satellites" and his thermonuclear microexplosion ignition concept[9][10] was adopted by the British Interplanetary Society for their Project Daedalus Starship Study.

[18] Winterberg also developed ideas for mining increasingly rare industrially crucial elements on planetary bodies such as the moon using fusion detonation devices.

According to Dennis King, Winterberg shared his ideas on beam weapons with the U.S. Air Force and he speculated on the subject in publications for the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF), a part of the Lyndon LaRouche movement.

The FEF published a book of Winterberg describing the design of the hydrogen bomb, with the hope of getting research in inertial confinement fusion declassified.

He also participated in a 1985 conference jointly sponsored by the FEF and the Schiller Institute, speaking on the topic of X-ray lasers, the Strategic Defense Initiative and interstellar travel.

[19] The conference attracted a number of scientists interested in promoting fusion scientific research;[19] Winterberg was never a member of any of LaRouche's political organisations.

[22] In 1983, Winterberg became involved in disputes concerning the engineer Arthur Rudolph, who had been brought to the United States after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip to work on the U.S. rocketry program.

In the early 1980s, Rudolph's record as a potential Nazi war criminal at Mittelwerk surfaced and became the center of a political controversy after the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) negotiated to have him renounce his U.S. citizenship, purportedly under duress,[23] after which he returned to Germany.

[25] After the fall of the Berlin wall legal assistant requests by the US Office of Special Investigation to the Communist East German Government regarding the Rudolph case emerged and became part of the public record.

[27] Winterberg published a refutation of these conclusions in 2004, observing that the galley proofs of Hilbert's articles had been tampered with — part of one page had been cut off.