Destination Moon Research Articles

Cold War ‘Astrofuturism’ and ‘Energy-Angst’ in Destination Moon and Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky

By situating De Witt Douglas Kilgore’s understanding of ‘astrofuturist’ American SF within the context of the postwar ‘Great Acceleration’ and petromodernity, this article reads astrofuturism’s extraterrestrial frontier as an energy frontier. Building on Jason Moore’s world-ecological understanding of the history of capitalism’s recurrent expansions as being dialectically tied to its demand for new sources of energy, the article suggests that a pervasive sense of ‘energy-angst’ underlies the more obvious tensions mobilising Cold War astrofuturism. This angst, prior to the emergence of ‘peak oil’ discourse by the mid-1970s, proleptically recognises the finitude of the ‘American Century’s’ petroculture. By imagining the exploration and colonization of extraterrestrial planets upon which crude has never formed, and travel through outer space in which internal combustion engines do not work, astrofuturism is, of necessity, a post-oil imaginary. Tracing the fissures and slippages within and between the optimistic imaginaries of two key texts, Farmer in the Sky (1950) and Destination Moon (1950), the article argues that astrofuturism’s energy frontiers contain as much potential for powered-down imaginaries as the more obvious powered-up visions suggested by high-energy rocket and terraforming technologies. Read in the context of today’s precarious petroculture, these texts, in their static perfectionism, invite us to consider how post-oil imaginaries can assist the project of sustainable and equitable energy transition.

Destination Moon: The Remarkable and Improbable Voyage of Apollo 11 by Richard Maurer

Destination Moon: The Remarkable and Improbable Voyage of Apollo 11 by Richard Maurer

“The Greatest Exploitation Special Ever”: <em>Destination Moon</em> and Postwar Independent Distribution

Eagle-Lion, an independent film producer and distributor from 1946 to 1951, attempted to compete with the major Hollywood studios by releasing inexpensive films known as programmers that had a unique marketing angle. One of the most successful of these was Destination Moon (1950), which initiated the 1950s boom in science-fiction cinema. The film’s semidocumentary mode was intended to broaden its appeal by differentiating it from more juvenile and fantastic examples of the genre. Despite Destination Moon ’s strong performance, Eagle-Lion was unable to achieve sustained success, due in part to the major studios’ continued control of distribution and exhibition.

The Greatest Adventure Awaiting Humankind

In 1946, Hollywood director and producer George Pal read an article in Life magazine titled “Trip to the Moon by Rocket,” and decided his next film would be what he called a science fact (as opposed to fiction) “documentary of the near future.” The result was Destination Moon (1950), a science fiction classic, credited with introducing the concept of space travel to post war America. The film makes reaching space an exercise in overcoming the unheimlich and unfamiliar, and negotiates the boundary between the known and the other. Pal hired Robert A. Heinlein to adapt his novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, for the film; the original story played into contemporary fears about Communism and a resurgence of Nazi power. But rather than make a film that resonated with social and political concerns, Pal—a Hungarian-born Jew, who fled Germany in 1934—chose to make a film that was about faith in technology, faith in the future, and used science fiction to illustrate his belief that the space age was going to be “The Beginning” of a new future for humanity. Part of the success of Destination Moon is that it tapped into a larger religious feeling in America at the time of its premier: one divorced from institutional religions, and which sociologist Will Herberg called America’s “faith in faith.” The film’s themes of discovery, sacrifice, triumph over circumstance, and the necessity of technology, are representative of Americans’ belief in a collective ability to overcome evil, and of a newfound faith in their destiny to conquer the “final frontier.”

Without Having Seen: Faith, the Future, and the Final American Frontier

The popularization of the science of space exploration in America after World War II has its roots in the nineteenth century. Mid-twentieth-century calls to “conquer” space were reanimations of nineteenth-century exhortations to “conquer” the American West in the name of God and to fulfill America’s manifest destiny. Magazine articles, television specials, and films such as Destination Moon (1950) explicitly connected the ephemeral space frontier to the historical Western frontier. In each medium, “space proselytizers,” like artist Chesley Bonestell, engineer Wernher von Braun, and writer Willy Ley, made clear connections between the American frontiersman of the previous century and the twentieth century’s space pioneer. This link is especially apparent in a series of articles on the emerging science of space exploration that ran in Collier’s magazine from 1952 until 1954. Space is viewed as “our new frontier,” and is championed through Bonestell’s paintings and von Braun’s invocation of the material frontier. Von Braun even closes his article by explaining that Americans are ready for a journey to “man’s oldest and last frontier: the heavens themselves.” Thus, the science of space exploration—in the Collier’s articles and elsewhere—was carefully framed as an endeavor analogous to the conquering of the American West. By situating space as humankind’s “last frontier,” the effort required to build a space program could become a moral endeavor and the fulfillment of America’s new manifest destiny.

Lost in Space: Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s

Lost in Space:Technology and Turbulence in Futuristic Cinema of the 1950s Andrew J. Huebner Before a commencement audience at Lehigh University in 1949, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) anticipated the central question guiding a forthcoming wave of futuristic Hollywood science fiction. In his remarks that day, titled "Science and the Spirit of Man," David Lilienthal asked the graduates and their guests, "Is our advancing technology good? Is the ever more important machine good? Or [is it] evil?"1 Just four years removed from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few in the audience would have missed the Cold War implications. Indeed, the cluster of 1950s films on futuristic space travel and alien invasion introduced audiences to all manner of weird machines, robots, weapons, and other phenomena, of human and alien origin, meant, in part, to represent nuclear arms, and the scholarship on those films has emphasized the Cold War elements accordingly.2 Yet for the AEC chairman—and for futuristic cinema in the 1950s—the problem of technology did not stop with atomic weaponry or the standoff with the Soviet Union. "It reaches into the lives of every one of us, old and young, rich and poor, you who graduate today and you who are freshmen," he said. "It concerns the housewife, the librarian, the [End Page 6] chemist; it must be faced by the clergyman, the professor and the physician no less than by the businessman and public official. For this is the kind of world we live in—the world of the machine—and this is the struggle of our time." Science and technology could "exhaust," "poison," "foul," or "devastate" the natural world, although they just as likely might "eliminate filth and congestion and disease...strengthen the soil...conserve the forests...humanize man's environment." In the hands of democracies, he said, returning to Cold War geopolitics, scientific and technological innovations promised to deliver humanity to the heights of individual freedom. In that scenario, "Men can direct technology so that it can carry mankind toward the fulfillment of the greatest promise for human life and the human spirit in all history."3 Lilienthal gave hopeful answers to his own questions that day, yet he recognized their thorniness in the "turbulent times in which we live."4 Futuristic films of the 1950s, for all their cheap thrills and crude storylines, took a similar tack. They shared Lilienthal's expansive view of technology, looking beyond the Cold War and voicing broad concerns over the triangular interplay of nature, religion, and scientific advancement. This article seeks to re-imagine space and alien potboilers, from Destination Moon (1950) to The Time Machine (1960), as signs of such disruption in postwar values, concerns, and relationships—indicators that the Cold War and other socio-political developments were changing the tenor of everyday life in America.5 To accomplish that, the article puts the movies into the context of contemporary debates airing in scientific, religious, political, and journalistic circles during the 1950s. Such positioning reveals that popular cinema offered American audiences a safe and entertaining space for confronting and comprehending the profound anxieties of the era. How might the technological revolution reach into "the lives of every one of us?" Americans found answers to that question—sometimes [End Page 7] disturbing ones—in the great cinematic clashes of men, machinery, and aliens of the 1950s. Naturally, the atomic bomb animated much of the insecurity and fear of the decade. Its development raised the public profile and institutional support of scientists, while simultaneously eroding confidence in their moral authority. The public association of scientists with the birth and implementation of atomic weaponry increasingly rendered them both authors of great human suffering and pawns of government, military, and industry. Filmmakers duly infused their pictures with such Cold War themes. Yet they also articulated a postwar shift in popular attitudes toward nature, the growth of a nascent environmental movement, perceptions of antagonism between technology and nature, and concerns about global population increases. The Cold War helped spur a concurrent spike in American religiosity in the 1950s, reviving public discussion—and cinematic coverage—of piety's place in a world of galloping technological change. Celluloid science fiction pitted...

“A Nightmare Land, A Place of Death”: An Exploration of the Moon as a Motif in Hergé’s Destination Moon (1953) and Explorers on the Moon (1954)

This article analyses the symbolic meaning of the Moon in two bande dessinee books from the Tintin series, Herge’s Destination Moon (Objectif Lune, 1953) and its sequel Explorers on the Moon (On a Marche sur la Lune, 1954). It argues that these two volumes stand out in the series for their graphic, narrative and philosophical emphasis on both intellectual achievement and physical death. The Moon, as a goal of modern science and a traditional artistic symbol, is made to celebrate the human mind. But Herge also makes it a dangerous no man’s land, where human beings are made to understand the limitations of their physical abilities. The Moon emphasises the distortion between human dreams of grandeur and the concrete impossibility of their realisation, and the threats they pose to corporeality. As a result, the article suggests that the Moon trip can be seen as a modern re-enactment of the mythological journey to Hell, as the works of the human mind are constantly thwarted by the risk of physical death.

Rocketships, Rayguns and UFOs

Rocketships, Rayguns and UFOs