Destination Moon (film)
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Destination Moon is a 1950 science fiction film directed by Irving Pichel. The movie was filmed in Technicolor and runs for 92 minutes.
Destination Moon was the first major science fiction film produced in the United States, and won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects. The script is based on the novel Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein.
The films producer, George Pál, later produced When Worlds Collide (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), and The Time Machine (1960).
Four American astronauts blast off from the Mojave Desert and fly to the Moon (before the Russians get there). They establish a base, but are not certain they have enough fuel to return to Earth...
This film features the notion that US private industry will take it upon itself to fund and produce the first spacecraft to reach the moon, given the Soviet threat at the time, and then the US government will bring itself to buy or lease the machinery. Visionary factory owners are shown trying to raise money amongst themselves to do this. The fictional rocket uses nuclear thermal propulsion, a method that has not been employed in any real launches to date.
It includes an animated segment of Woody Woodpecker illustrating the basics of space flight.
Although there were no scenes of the rocket being constructed, a Douglas aircraft plant in Southern California was shown with workers examining a model of the nuclear spacecraft. The only plot element in the picture is that once on the moon, they do not have enough fuel to return, and so must remove a good deal of equipment from the ship. This movie was not the first such to hit the screens, however; Rocketship X-M stole its thunder. The sets and costumes were used in cheap films subsequently, and even appear in the second episode of The Time Tunnel.