Rockets to the moon proliferated in books for young readers in the postwar years. In Robert A. Heinlein’s young-adult novel Rocket Ship Galile (1947), a team of American teenagers flies a rocket to the moon (“You be a good boy on the moon,” one mom instructs), only to find that the Nazis beat them there. In Marcia Martin’s children’s book Tom Corbett: A Trip to the Moon (1953), little Johnny and Janie ride there in Corbett’s spaceship Polaris. “Look out for the big holes,” Corbett cautions the kids as they make their own giant leaps for mankind.
The film Destination Moon (1950), may be the most scientifically sound space movie of the decade, features a script written in part by Heinlein, beautiful art by the science and sci-fi illustrator Chesley Bonestell, and even a cartoon in which Woody Woodpecker explains the physics of spaceflight. (Heinlein also wrote a treatment for a never-produced film called Abbott and Costello Move to the Moon.)
In the mid-1950s the Disneyland television program showed a series of hourlong Tomorrowland episodes about space flight. Combining lectures by von Braun and other rocket scientists, live-action drama and ingenious animation, the shows, available on DVD, are still marvelous feats of education and entertainment.
Pre-1969 moon movies weren’t all intended as family fare. The lunar inhabitants in the low-budget Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) are young women in black tights (billed as the Hollywood Cover Girls) with designs on Earth’s men. The very low-budget Nude on the Moon (1961) peoples the satellite (actually the tourist attraction Coral Castle in Florida) with topless women.
Ordway helped make 2001: A Space Odyssey one of the most convincing spaceflight films ever. Released in the spring of 1968, a year and a few months before Armstrong’s epochal footstep, it may have been all too accurate in one sense. In depicting lunar travel as routine and even humdrum, it anticipated how worldwide excitement over the Apollo 11 trip turned to global disinterest in later lunar missions. Maybe after 2,000 years of three-headed vultures, man-bats and topless ladies, the real moon couldn’t help but seem a little dull once we got there.
Today NASA is planning to return men to the moon by around 2020, then venture on to Mars. Ordway, who remembered when NASA planned to put men on Mars by 1987, wholeheartedly approves.
“The next step has to be taken,” he said. “If we don’t take it, someone else will.”
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