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Where the BIS had engineering, Hollywood had elegance. True, the
British Interplanetary Society's design for a Moon lander was the
closest of the lot as to how it was really done, so ten out of ten for
accuracy, but Destination Moon had the rocket design that
caught the public's imagination. It was the archetype rocket ship,
and though it is not how manned spacecraft look, it should be.
Based
very loosely (Moon, spaceship, nothing else) on a Robert Heinlein
novel, this trip to the Moon entry illustrates an attention to detail
with a beautiful example of why space travel is not such a breezy
affair as some people thought it would be. With Heinlein acting
as technical adviser, Destination Moon deals with a lot of
details that space pictures tend not to think of. How do you eat
and drink in zero gravity? How do you cope with acceleration?
Space sickness? How does a rocket work in space? Even the design
on the rocket is tolerably practical, except for one thing. In
this illustration you can see a cutaway of the spaceship. Fuel
tanks, pressurization tanks, fuel lines, and bulkheads all look good,
but what's that under the man's left hand? It's that fly in
every rocket scientist's ointment: the engine.
Spaceship Luna: exterior and interior view
The
engine decides everything about how a spaceship is put together
because how much power it generates, how heavy it is, and all it's
other properties are going to determine how much fuel you need and
payload you can carry and that determines how the ship will look.
Destination Moon gets around this by giving the spaceship an
atomic motor, and it is the most docile yet fantastically powerful
piece of nuclear hardware ever imagined. It can lift a 150 ft
single-stage spaceship with four men, equipment and supplies to the
Moon and back without any messy problems of radiation or other
nastiness. If I could show up at NASA tomorrow with such an
engine my feet would be sopping wet from all the kisses.
In one alarmingly accurate scene, the landing on
the moon goes wrong at the last second and the pilot sets down with a
bare minimum of fuel left over, which is exactly what happened on the
Apollo 11 landing.
Once down, the moon explorers are treated to the
Moon as envisioned by Chesley Bonestell. It is one of the great
injustices of the 20th century that when we finally got to the Moon we
did not see these beautiful Bonestell panoramas, but rather a
sun-bleached version of the Wigan Alps.
