The Greatest Adventure Awaiting Humankind: 'Destination Moon' and Faith in the Future

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX

[IR 17.4 (2014) 459–479] Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463-9955 doi:10.1558/imre.v17i4.459 Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743-1697

The Greatest Adventure Awaiting Humankind: Destination Moon and Faith in the Future

Catherine L. Newell

University of Miami

[email protected]

AbstractIn 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 clas-sic, 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 go-ing 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 dis-covery, 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.”

Keywords science fiction, faith, space, final frontier, conquest, future

In 1946, Hollywood director and producer George Pal read an article in Life magazine entitled “Trip to the Moon by Rocket” and knew exactly

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460 Catherine L. Newell

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2014

what kind of movie he wanted to make: a “documentary of the near future” (Humphries 2008). He knew it would be a science fiction film, illustrating the way in which humanity would soon leave the Earth and explore the Moon—and perhaps beyond. While it seems a bit of a cheek to write an academic article about a science fiction film when the film under discus-sion was specifically conceived and marketed as a “documentary of the near future,” I believe the journey to the Moon depicted in the 1950 sci-ence fiction classic Destination Moon was then, and is now, unique, in that the intent was not to dazzle the audience with implausible heroics and slimy aliens.

From its inception, Pal was adamant that the film should be simply an extrapolation of contemporary science and technology. He wanted to accurately portray the exciting future of exploration and conquest that he and other prophets of space exploration believed was America’s future, and he wanted to use the medium of science fiction to help make that future come to life. But while science fiction frequently functions as exactly this kind of intelligent estimation of what the future will look like, what the film did was also to reflect contemporary patterns in lived religion back to its American audience. Destination Moon demonstrates the way in which science fiction merges science and technology with a culture’s reli-gious proclivities. Specifically, the film fused faith in technology with what sociologist of religion Will Herberg believed was America’s lived religion (“faith in faith”), and so utilized the religious themes of sacrifice, belief, and a sense of a calling to create a story that is both a locus of faith and a source of cultural inspiration.

In the sense that Pal and the film’s creators wanted to make a movie that brought the near future to life, the film that resulted was in keeping with much of the literary science-fiction that arose during the Second World War (Cheng 2012, 298–299). Science-watchers and intelligent lay people had insisted for almost a decade that science fiction needed to put away visions of aliens and space cowboys, and keep up with technological innovations and scientific discoveries. But visual representations of science fiction lingered in the category of “fantasy”: science fiction films of the era were still stuck in the frothy era of the “pulps,” and were more akin to mod-ern soap operas than science fiction tales (Cheng 2012, 15 ff.). Pal’s idea for the film was unique in Hollywood, in that the story he most wanted to tell was not a fantasy: it was about the potential of science and technol-ogy, aided by an American sense of a calling by the Divine, to triumph over the dark forces of Communism and technological dread. Pal hired

The Greatest Adventure Awaiting Humankind 461


Robert A. Heinlein to adapt his novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, for the screen-play. Although it was a story that played into contemporary fears about Communism and a resurgence of Nazi power, Pal chose Heinlein’s 1947 novel because it explained the steps that might be involved in undertaking an expedition to the Moon by rocket. Pal and his screenwriters, including Heinlein, took the basic concept—Americans racing to the Moon, ahead of an enemy (Russia is implied, but not specified, in the film)—but turned the film’s tension on to the building, launching, and landing of the space-ship Luna on the Moon’s surface.1

Thus, rather than make a film that resonated with contemporary politi-cal concerns, Pal—a Hungarian-born Jew, who fled Germany in 1934—chose to make a film that was about faith in technology and 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. The hero of the story is both American technology and American confidence, and the mechanism of triumph is faith: faith in American resourcefulness, faith that reaching the Moon is something both significant and necessary, and faith that we are meant to go there. The motifs of faith, sacrifice, and American chosenness are also closely aligned with contemporary changes in American patterns of religion that were noted by Herberg in his 1955 book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. In that sense, I believe Destination Moon tapped into a larger religious feeling in America at the time of its pre-mier, one that was distinct from institutional religions and which Herberg called “faith in faith.” The film’s themes of discovery, sacrifice, triumph over circumstance, and the necessity of technology, were visible representations of America’s belief in a collective ability to overcome evil, and of a new-found faith in their destiny to conquer the “final frontier.”

The faith that Pal put so prominently on display was not just Ameri-can jingoism, however. The faith in the necessity of “the greatest adven-ture awaiting mankind,”2 was part of a larger sweep in American religion that collapsed institutional religion into American culture, and laid the groundwork for turning fiction into reality. Rather than being those “who have not seen and yet have believed”—who, Jesus assured his disciples, are among the blessed ( John 20.29)—Destination Moon provided a nation of believers with an opportunity to see and then believe. And belief was a

1. Neither Bonestell nor Ley designed Luna; the ship was designed by Ernst Fergé, the film’s art director.

2. This was the tagline for both Destination Moon and The Conquest of Space (1949), about which more below.



significant part of the American religious experience in the Cold War era, a time of massive changes in worship and in religious affiliation. While in the first half of the 1950s America experienced an increase in church and synagogue membership that grew twice as fast as the population (Herberg 1955, 60), religion was a means to “ ‘belonging’ rather than a way of reori-enting life to God” (Herberg 1955, 260). The pattern of faith on display in Destination Moon is the great civil religion of the American Way of Life, which Herberg tells us is marked by America’s “faith in faith”: a method of belief that, in its “extroverted,” collective form, becomes a kind of “positive thinking” that requires the practitioner to “not lose confidence in oneself and one’s activities” (Herberg 1955, 89–90).

This “cult of faith” lies at the heart of the film’s plot, and adds a double meaning to its history. The film’s storyline—that a stunt-type trip to the Moon, which bypasses both government and popular skepticism, creates a kind of popular faith in space travel—effectively mirrors the film itself: America, through the faith of the film’s literal and fictional crew, will now see, and this, in turn, will give them reason to believe. For this reason, Des-tination Moon is listed as the first step in building popular support for the Mercury/Apollo program in the U.S. during the 1950s; while it was far ahead of its time in terms of technology, it used the existing medium of science fiction as an outlet for the faith of the time.

The film’s crew included three remarkable men, each of whom in his own way was attempting to bring a future of space exploration to life in his own work. Pal, the film’s producer, was a Hungarian immigrant who became one of Hollywood’s most influential figures, a “dreamer [and] romantic” whose science fiction and fantasy were successful because he believed so deeply in their possibility (Hickman 1977, 17). Heinlein, the head writer, was a naval engineer and space proselytizer who believed not only that America was capable of reaching other planets, but that space exploration was a military necessity. And finally, the film’s set designer and scientific advisor was Chesley Bonestell, an architect turned “space artist” whose remarkable paintings of the surface of the Moon and other planets were what inspired Pal to make a science fiction film in the first place. Heinlein, Pal, and Bonestell were all very clear on the fact that Destination Moon was intended to be a realistic visualization of space travel.

Their hope was that this vision of space could help change America’s mind about both the potential dangers of technology and the plausibility of space exploration. They realized that space exploration “on the screen had to be based on ‘genuine’ science and engineering; not science in the



service of political motives” (Kirby 2010, 59). All three were, in a sense, playing the long game of drumming up support for a future that involved space exploration, but understood that the “only way an audience would support space endeavors was if the audience believed that the space flight in the film was actually possible” (Kirby 2010, 59). Thus, the plot of the film was almost secondary to the themes and visual images of the journey to the Moon by rocket, and of the Earth from space; the real “star” of the film was always meant to be the technology of space travel. But while Desti-nation Moon’s creative team was determined to produce a film that was a realistic portrayal of space travel, running through this science fiction clas-sic are familiar motifs of faith, sacrifice, and a sense of a calling (Weber et al. 1930, xii ff.). The coincidence of the film’s timing was that it came out precisely when American church involvement and attendance were on the rise, but (conversely, perhaps) at the beginning of the ascent of a kind of homogenized American “faith in faith.” While none of Pal, Heinlein, or Bonestell belonged to any of the classical institutions of faith, they created a film that used science fiction to tell a distinctively American story about the power of faith and the necessity of belief.

Besides Pal, there was another group of people who wanted to see a “science fact” film and who were accomplished at believing what at first seemed impossible: science fiction fans. Science fiction in the interwar period steadily took on real science as its inspiration; science fiction in general was gradually less about fantasy, and more about producing accu-rate predictions of the future (Cheng 2012, 298–299). In that sense, Desti-nation Moon was also right on its terrestrial target. Pal was giving the bur-geoning science fiction fan base its first visual taste of the future, right at the proverbial “dawn of the atomic age,” when the future felt like a danger-ous proposition to much of America. But what is unique about Destination Moon is that while science fiction in the next few years became steeped with moral lessons about the evils of atomic energy and the dangers of Communism, the film stands out as being unapologetically optimistic. The only impending doom is the failure to act. One of the messages of the film is that the American people need to be more attentive to science and technology, because a bright future lies on the other side of the frontiers of science: a future made visible by science fiction.

Hollywood was an untapped resource, that had the potential to unite science fiction with more mainstream interests in real science. With American interest in space exploration riding on a wave of the popularity of Bonestell’s space art in popular magazines, and his 1949 book titled The



Conquest of Space (an internationally best-selling book about space explo-ration), science fiction films were “the best dramatic medium for exploring the implications of the human conquest of space” (Gilbert 1997, 240). The uptick in the quality of special effects over the previous decade would surely provide a way to bring space to life for moviegoers, and the script for a film about space exploration and conquest should be easy to find among the hundreds of films produced every year, while the growing interest in space exploration, thanks to the science fiction “pulps,” especially after the publication of The Conquest of Space, guaranteed that a science fiction film would have a willing audience. For one of Pal’s goals, shared by Bonestell and Heinlein, was to move the American imagination into a previously unexplored territory: a science fiction film that was more scientific than sensational.

George Pal began his unexpected career by studying architecture. Bon-estell’s architectural knowledge contributed to the mathematical precise-ness of his paintings; Pal’s architectural education seems to have given him an engaging inventiveness and an eye for dramatic effect. More than any-thing, Pal’s architectural studies made him an accomplished artist in his own right, a skill he turned over to advertising when, in 1929, he went to work for an Austrian studio making commercials. A year later, and without knowing any German, Pal showed up in Berlin and talked his way into Ufa Studios, where he became the head of the advertising and animation department. It was in Berlin in 1932 that he invented his trademark stop-action technique, a form of puppetry that eventually led to his “Puppe-toons,” a set of animated films that made Pal famous throughout Europe.

Pal’s new special effect also secured himself, wife, and infant son pas-sage out of Germany in 1933; they left a full house and a thriving studio the “very night Hitler came to power” (Hankin 2008). They first settled in Prague, and then Paris, where they remained until 1939, when it became obvious that the situation in Europe was deteriorating rapidly. Although Pal and his family were offered transport to England—where Pal’s animation techniques were deemed “ideal for propaganda purposes” (Hankin 2008)—at the last moment they secured visas to America. So, repeating the exodus of six years before, the Pals fled Paris with hardly more than the clothes on their backs (and a few of Pal’s animation models) for New York City.

Their status as refugee immigrants did not last long, however: Pal was quickly “discovered” by Barney Balaban, the head of Paramount Pictures in New York. Balaban “fell in love” with Pal’s animation, signed him for six short films “with”—as one biographer (Hankin 2008) notes to Pal’s



relief—“not an advertising slogan in sight,” and set him up in a small garage-cum-studio in Hollywood. The studio became a gathering place for Hollywood’s most famous animators, including Walter Lantz (crea-tor and animator of the Woody Woodpecker cartoons), and several artists who came as freelance workers from Walt Disney studios and stayed to be full-time Puppetoon animators. Disney also befriended Pal and was a great admirer of his work. Pal’s status as a Hollywood innovator was sealed when he was presented with a “Special Award” Oscar in 1943 “for the development of novel methods and techniques in the production of short subjects known as Puppetoons” (quoted in Hankin 2008).

After the war—during which the Puppetoons flourished as propagan-dists and morale builders—business slowed considerably, and in 1947 Pal closed his animation studio in order to become a director and producer. After directing a short, black-and-white fairy tale in 1949, Pal felt he was ready to push the boundaries of fantasy by combining the plausible with the fantastic. Just as he knew that the Puppetoons had played out their usefulness during the War, he also knew that it was time for the upswing of another genre—a whole new form of filmmaking. So in 1949 George Pal turned his hand to science fiction. It was a choice that set him against the Hollywood mainstream, which favored war epics, dramas, romantic comedies, and Westerns, but considered science fiction a form of storytell-ing best suited to short films for children.

The film Pal decided to make, broke out of the Hollywood mold right from the start. It was a hybrid of Bonestell’s 1946 Life magazine article and Heinlein’s 1947 novel, Rocket Ship Galileo. The Life article was made up almost entirely of paintings by Bonestell, and was meant to be a scien-tifically accurate depiction of a journey to the Moon. The paintings were made in collaboration with Willy Ley, his co-author for The Conquest of Space. Ley was a German-born rocket historian who came to the U.S. in 1935, and was America’s “resident reporter” on rocketry and a general rocket expert during World War II. Like Pal, Ley was a big believer in the future, and made it his mission to convince America that the technolo-gies built for war, such as atomic power and the V-2 rocket, could be used to explore space. The images in Life not only illustrated how an atomic-powered rocket could leave Earth and reach the Moon, but showcased Bonestell’s ability to create paintings that looked like photographs (Miller and Durant 2001, 61–62). Bonestell’s knack for rendering a painting that looked like a photo was a skill he learned when he left his career as an architect to become a special effects artist in Hollywood. However, also



on display in the Life article was his devotion to scientific accuracy, a skill he learned as an architect and as a life-long amateur astronomer. Indeed, he later became a pivotal spokesperson for space exploration, producing hundreds of scientifically-precise paintings of other planets. Born in 1888, Bonestell lived to be nearly 100 years old, and spent the latter half of his life making space and space exploration visible to both America and the rest of the world. His passion, from the age of seven, was outer space: he created his first painting of another planet at seventeen, and didn’t stop for the better part of the twentieth century.

When he first came to Pal’s notice in 1946, however, Bonestell was still slowly climbing toward becoming a household name for his “space paint-ings.” His first widely circulated set of paintings premiered in another Life magazine article on May 29, 1944. That first article, “Solar System: It is Modeled in Miniature by Saturn, its Rings, and Nine Moons,” was published just a week before D-Day, and depicted the landscapes of Sat-urn’s various moons as they would appear to an explorer moving toward the planet by “hopping” from moon to moon (Life May 29 1944, 78–80). Some of the paintings even featured tiny explorers on the moons’ surfaces surveying the new environment, a theme that would repeat itself in “Trip to the Moon,” and give Pal the idea of bringing those explorers to life through film. What fascinated Pal about the 1946 article was a vision of humanity that was literally limitless: the first few images of the article feature an atomic rocket slipping out of Earth’s atmosphere and slowly “falling” toward the Moon, while the second half depicts explorers climb-ing out of the Moon’s deep canyons by the light of a bright blue Earth. He had Bonestell recreate these images for Destination Moon and included the same action, down to the detail of the “ship’s occupants” (the term “astro-naut” was still several years away) performing an EVA—an extravehicular activity (Life, March 4, 1946, 73–76). What also caught Pal’s attention was Bonestell’s adamant declaration that his paintings were not science fic-tion—they were “science fact.” It was Bonestell’s devotion to representing outer space as a scientifically viable site of exploration, using technologies generated during the Second World War, that Pal found inspiring.

Heinlein’s book was intended to be part of a juvenilia series about young engineers—young men who eschew driving cars and chasing girls for the monastic pursuit of building rockets and exploring the Moon, and who are almost definitively patterned on Heinlein himself—and the texture of the book’s prose is solidly young adult. In this respect, the book was a bridge, of sorts, that moved Heinlein out of the rough world of the pulps and into



longer novels. The book offered an opportunity for character development, and especially an explanation of why any sane person would want to go to the Moon. The action in the first half of the novel is engineering-oriented, and reflects the contemporary push in science fiction fandom for science fiction that was scientifically plausible, rather than an ordinary hero’s adventure story set on another planet (Cheng 2008, 300). But the “gee-whiz” dialogue is more reminiscent of the pulps than it is of Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, the gold standard in science fiction. Though rich in technical detail the plot is thin in parts, and begins with the somewhat implausible premise that a veteran of the Manhattan Project recruits his nephew and two of his nephew’s friends to help him launch a rocket to the Moon. For the film, Heinlein—and seasoned screenwriters Alford “Rip” van Ronkel and James O’Hanalon, brought aboard to shape the novel into a film—left out the high school rocket club, and instead substituted the more plausible concept of adult engineers who take advantage of the real and burgeoning aeronautics industry of southern California.3

The task before the producer and his crew was daunting, because in 1950 science fiction as a theatrical vehicle for dramatic or series stories was vir-tually unheard of. After the generic drama, the dominant genre of the day was the Western, a form of storytelling that played into post-war senti-ments of American exceptionalism and the rightness of American values (Kirby 2010, 60). For the major Hollywood studios, Westerns were a sure bet: they were guaranteed to draw crowds who wanted to see their favorite actors, directed by the system’s best crews. While the steadily flourishing genre of science fiction shared equal shelf space with Westerns on the newsstand as pulp fiction magazines, and on the radio with science fic-tion shows, Hollywood was and remained enamored of the Western. There were five Westerns released in 1949—two of which starred John Wayne (The Fighting Kentuckian and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon; he also starred in Sands of Iwo Jima the same year)—and fifty-nine dramas, including DeMille’s epic Samson and Delilah; All the King’s Men, which won the Oscar for the year’s best film; The Heiress; and The Fountainhead, for which Chesley Bonestell did the matte backgrounds.

Thus in the late 1940s and early 1950s, popular science fiction—the sto-ries and heroes that most Americans knew and recognized—was limited to the cultural touchstones of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, the lone

3. Many commentators on the film note that the film’s plot more closely resembles Heinlein’s next novel, The Man Who Sold the Moon (1951).



science fiction icons of their day, amid a sea of cowboy and frontier-related radio shows and feature films. Both began life as “funny paper” cartoon serials. “Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century” first appeared as a daily comic in January 1929, and at its peak achieved a media saturation rare for any kind of science fiction, appearing in over 400 daily newspapers around the world and translated into eighteen languages.4 The comic’s suc-cess rolled right into a radio show that began three years later, in 1932, and ran through 1947.5 (It was also the first science fiction story to become a radio show.) Flash leapfrogged Buck, however, when in 1936 the Flash Gordon story was produced as a movie serial, of ten to twelve 20-minute chapters in a longer story arc, which were presented before feature films. Buck got his own movie serial in 1939.6 The two serials not only inspired other “space operas,”7 as they came to be known, but also became common parlance in popular culture. By 1949, “Buck Rogers” and “science fiction” become synonymous; indeed, the type of science fiction future portrayed in the Buck Rogers serials—interplanetary travel, futuristic cities, military bases on other worlds—became a metonym for the future.

Buck Rogers was also about as far as the average American’s experience with science fiction extended: science fiction was fodder for space operas, and fluff for kids to enjoy. Science fiction as a film or literary genre was considered in the 1940s and early 1950s either a relic of the era of the great science fiction writers of decades before, such as Verne or Wells, or as an unhealthy pastime for infantile and socially underdeveloped teenage boys. While many science fiction authors made the case that science fiction was winning new scientists for the future by interesting imaginative children in science, the majority of Americans were still either dismissive or suspicious of science fiction.8 An article by Winthrop Sargeant in the 21 May 1951,

4. “The Buck Rogers Web Site.” http://www.buck-rogers.com/comic_strip/.5. “The Buck Rogers Web Site.” http://www.buck-rogers.com/radio_serial/.6. Due either to limited budgets or a lack of imagination on the part of the movie

studios, actor Buster Crabbe portrayed both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in their cinematic iterations.

7. Probably most famously, George Lucas has mentioned the movie serials as a major inspiration for his own space opera, Star Wars (1977).

8. Isaac Asimov, “The By-Product of Science Fiction.” AIBS Bulletin, 7:1 ( Jan 1957). 25-27. Asimov quotes a letter written by a young man to the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, who explains, “I feel I owe you and ‘Astounding’ a great deal. Unknowingly, your magazine in particular, and science fiction in general have been a great influence in the shaping of my life…I have just won a scholarship to the



issue of Life magazine observed the growth of the science fiction genre with derisive concern for the (mostly young male) “fervid and crusading fringe” of the American public who read science fiction. Sargeant—a musician by training and music critic by happenstance9—regarded with amused superi-ority the derivative nature of the storylines, explaining that the stories are a “type of cosmic romance known to the trade as ‘space opera,’ which differs from the old-fashioned western merely in the fact that its heroes ride rock-ets instead of palominos and carry paraguns (shooting paralysis-dealing rays) instead of six-shooters” (Sargeant 1951).

Despite the cultural bias against science fiction, in 1949 George Pal walked right out of conventional (and profitable) filmmaking and into the realm of Buck Rogers. Pal wanted the future; the future was something he’d nearly lost during the war, and something he wanted to illustrate boldly. But rather than make another space opera, or attempt to bring to life the pulp magazines that Sargeant and others railed against, Pal decided he wanted to make his “documentary of the near future.” So, in 1948, Pal took Bonestell’s “Journey to the Moon by Rocket” article in Life as his starting place, and set to work acquiring a writer, a director, and Chesley Bonestell. Interest-ingly, he secured Bonestell as both his special effects artist and science advi-sor (Miller and Durant 2010, 64). The film’s director was Irving Pichel, a veteran actor and director, and the production designer was Ernst Fegté. Pal was insistent that, in keeping with the political plausibility of the film, both the Moon and the rocket be as near-to-realistic as possible. He could not have chosen a man more dedicated to astronomical realism than Ches-ley Bonestell; Bonestell had invented his own third career as a space artist, precisely because he so badly wanted art to properly represent astronomical science. And in the spirit of accurately rendering the future of space flight, Bonestell’s dedication to scientific realism was humored by the producer and crew. The first revision the film’s science advisor made was a landing place for the Luna. Heinlein’s original story had the space explorers landing on the crater Aristarchus, but he soon found out that Aristarchus would not do for Bonestell’s Moon. Because “Mr. Bonestell knows more about the sur-face of the moon than any other living man,” Heinlein ceded the privilege of choosing a suitable crater to him (Miller and Durant 2010, 64).

Working from photographs of the Moon taken at the Mount Wilson observatory, and from his own particular artistic tastes, Bonestell traveled

University of Chicago and I will take up biochemistry” (27). 9. He also researched and wrote a very famous translation of The Bhagavad-Gita.



across the surface of the Moon until he found his Goldilocks landing site: Harpalus, a crater in the high northern latitudes of the Moon that directly faces Earth. Heinlein recalled Bonestell emphasizing, “High latitude was necessary so that the earth would appear down near the horizon where the camera could see it and still pick up some lunar landscape”(Miller and Durant 2010, 64). Bonestell began his set design with the same type of clay model he used to begin his space paintings. From the relatively tiny model Bonestell created a 14-foot long painting of the crater’s interior, which was used primarily as a backdrop and reproduced by the studio as a cyclorama for additional scenes (Vaz and Barron 2002, 153).10 Behind Bonestell’s Harpalus was an enormous black sky, studded with lights that were meant to represent the stars. The Earth, visible just beyond the rocky shoulder of Harpalus’s southern edge, was portrayed by a ping-pong ball—painted with faint blue lines and hanging from an invisible blackened string.

Bonestell’s rigorous adherence to authenticity amused the film crew, especially Heinlein. Everyone was impressed by his knowledge, his devo-tion to detail, and his insistence on things being exactly right. The film’s goal, after all, was to present a believable future, as opposed to the embel-lished fiction of Buck Rogers. So Pal, Heinlein, Pichel, and the studio’s art-ists let Bonestell fuss and change and fix—and thanked him for it. But after the movie began filming Bonestell was distressed to discover that Fegté replaced the fine dust that Bonestell and the astronomical advisers had recommended for the Moon’s “surface” with large mud cracks. Twenty-five years after the film premiered, Bonestell was still mad. “I had nothing to do with it,” he declared during an interview in the mid-1970s. “Naturally,” he explained, because there is no water on the surface of the Moon, “you’d never expect to get cracked mud” (Miller and Durant 2010, 64). Bonestell was even more scandalized by the inaccuracy of the stars above Harpalus’s rim. Tight budgets and a short filming schedule meant that each “star” was one of 1,500 mass-produced car headlight bulbs, installed by the film’s crew and all of the same wattage. Bonestell explained to his director and pro-ducer that, from a point of view on the surface of the Moon (and not unlike the view from the surface of the Earth), each star has its own intensity, a marked value on a brightness scale, and does not look like the front end of

10. For years Bonestell and Pal believed that the 14-foot painting was destroyed in a fire at Pal’s home, where it was kept in storage after filming. Thirty-five years later, the 14-foot painting was discovered in the possession of a collector named Bob Burns. Burns packed up the painting, drove it to Carmel, and presented it to the ninety-seven-year old Chesley, who autographed it.



on-coming Buick. But time and budgets overruled Chesley: the mud cracks were left in, to help give the shallow and small set the illusion of depth, and the headlight-stars kept their unvarying places above the crater’s rim.11

Bonestell’s matte background, however, doesn’t appear until halfway through the film. The entire first half of the ninety-minute movie involves the tension around building the ship and ducking the enterprise’s would-be naysayers. The film begins with real footage of a failed launch of a V-2-like rocket; the fictional failure is so spectacular that Army general Thayer (Tom Powers) immediately suspects sabotage. When the failure results in the program being postponed, the rocket’s designer, Dr. Charles Cargraves (Warner Anderson), admits he was expecting the government’s cancella-tion of the rocket program. Two years later, Thayer recruits aircraft execu-tive Jim Barnes ( John Archer) to help build an atomic rocket that will take the U.S. to the Moon, explaining that if America doesn’t go soon, somebody else will. They will rebuild Cargraves’s rocket, and land on the Moon within the year. The two men decide that this is a job for American industry—the same industrial complex that won the war—and set out to recruit several of the nation’s leading industrialists. The skeptical corporate leaders are treated to a short film featuring a “Hollywood star” to explain the premise to them; no personage less than Woody Woodpecker appears to explain the physics of atomic-powered space flight. The cartoon cleverly summarizes the plausibility of the whole enterprise,12 and the deal is sealed when a large-hatted Texan declares that the rocket needs to be built in Texas, because it’s the only state big enough to hold it.

Production begins in southern California, and despite the Texan’s asser-tion, the rocket is assembled in New Mexico, out in the same desert where rockets were actually being built and tested at the time. But when word gets out that a private company intends to launch an “atomic rocket” in the desert, furious and fearful citizens appeal to the government to stop them. In a fit of the libertarian politics for which Heinlein later became famous, the general and his civilian crew decide to launch the rocket—untested,

11. Bonestell might not have liked the mudflat floor, but a preview of the film in the New York Times makes a special point of explaining that the “serrated foreground…is made of hollow-cast plaster. Each ‘flake’ weighs approximately seventy pounds” (“Hollywood Shoots for the Moon,” February 19 1950). The Luna and the explorers each get a photo, but the backdrop and the famous mud floor get their own panoramic photo.

12. It also set a precedent for future sci-fi films that required a quick summary of dense scientific ideas to use a short cartoon. Arguably the most famous film to use this technique is Jurassic Park (1993).



and with the last-minute addition of Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson) as an electronics technician—at the next appropriate opportunity, which is just seventeen hours away. With worried wives gently reassured and the media scuttled away to a safe distance, the crew climbs aboard the massive rocket, now christened the Luna, and strap themselves into horizontal bed-like seats for the launch. The audience sees the launch with its crew through a portal-shaped video screen that looks down and back at the Earth (a Bon-estell matte painting of our planet from space) as the ships gains altitude. The simulated launch remains one of the best pre-Mercury depictions of the effects of an Earth-to-orbit take-off, complete with the crews’ faces gruesomely contorted by the initial g-forces and the reluctant Sweeney suffering miserably from “space sickness.” Once free of Earth’s gravity and while slowly falling toward the Moon, Cargraves unstraps himself from his prone position and floats up through the ship’s cabin to retrieve magnetic boots for the crew to wear while they pilot the Luna toward the Moon’s surface. It is a spectacular demonstration of 1949 special effects—the shot of Cargraves floating through the ship is so seamless that you can barely see the piano wires he’s hanging from.

Once the crew is irrevocably out of Earth’s gravity and falling toward the Moon, problems begin to mount. A radio antenna hastily attached to the ship just before its launch freezes, and while attempting to fix it Cargraves loses his hold on the ship and must be rescued by Barnes, who cleverly employs an oxygen “bottle” as a make-shift thruster to retrieve him.13 The men successfully land in the Moon’s Harpalus crater, and Cargraves claims the Moon by stating in a stiff, ceremonial tone: “By the grace of God, and in the name of the United States of America, I take possession of this planet on behalf of, and for the benefit of, all mankind” (Anderson et al. 1950). But not long after this “christening” they realize that they burned too much fuel in the landing (the Eagle nearly suffered a similar fate nine-teen years later, but was, of course, successfully piloted to the surface by Neil Armstrong, with just 30 seconds of fuel to spare). Confronted with the realization that they might not make it back to Earth, the crew strips the Luna of all non-essential gear, hoping that by cutting down on weight they’ll have enough fuel for liftoff. When the calculations show that they are a mere, and cruel, one hundred pounds overweight, Sweeney—the skeptic who agreed to join the expedition out of a perverse curiosity to see

13. A similar technique was used by Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) to pilot herself through space with a fire extinguisher toward the Chinese space station in Gravity (2013), a film that owes a great deal to Destination Moon.



if it would fail—quietly slips out of the ship in his spacesuit, intending to sacrifice himself by remaining on the Moon’s surface so his crew can get back to Earth. With the window of time during which the crew can safely lift off closing fast, the other men realize what Sweeney has done, devise an ingenious solution to leave his suit, which alone is more than a hundred pounds, outside the airlock while keeping Sweeney in, and take off again for Earth in the proverbial nick of time.“We’re going home,” Cargraves announces proudly, and the camera leaves the interior of the ship to show the Moon growing steadily smaller as we pan out to see the Luna on her homeward trajectory. The final shot is a Bonestell painting of Earth from space, an image similar to the penultimate painting in the 1946 Life maga-zine article and one of the first times such a large audience had seen what Earth looked like from space. In an impressive display of conviction, this final image of Earth is overlaid with the closing proclamation that reads, “This is The End…of the Beginning.”

Despite Bonestell’s curmudgeonly criticism of the unempirical mud cracks, the film was a huge success.14 It made more money than most other films released that year, including Rocketship X-M, a copy-cat film shunted through a rival studio with the intention of pre-empting Destination Moon.15 Fegté was nominated for an Academy Award for his art direction, and Destination Moon won the 1951 Academy Award for Best Special Effects. The film also won the 1951 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Pres-entation, an honor that meant the science fiction film had successfully balanced its science fiction appeal with the mass market. Arguably, how-ever, the film’s greatest accomplishment was staying true to Pal’s declara-tion that he wanted to make a film that was science fact, not science fic-tion. What most viewers liked was that the film portrayed a plausible near future; as with Bonestell’s space paintings, there were no lunar maidens or improbable heroes. The movie was the opposite of a Buck Rogers serial, even while it was science fiction, a film meant for both grown-ups and the

14. And it seems that Heinlein really didn’t mind Bonestell moving the ship’s landing site on the Moon, or at least forgave Bonestell sufficiently to coin an adjective—“bonestelled”—in Chesley’s honor in his 1961 book, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Putnam, 1961).

15. Two years later, the same team made Flight to Mars, which recycled sets and costumes from Rocketship X-M. That film was made in less than three weeks and thrust into cinemas before it was reliably edited, in order to leapfrog Destination Moon’s release date and capture Pal’s audience first. While Destination Moon is remembered today as a science fiction classic, Rocketship X-M—which was shot in 18 days—is remembered primarily as episode 201 of Mystery Science Theater 3000.



future’s space travelers to enjoy. In the annals of Hollywood history it is considered the beginning of the “great science fiction movie boom” of the 1950s (DiFate 1997, 42). And everyone’s favorite part of Destination Moon was the dramatic pause following the final “The End,” filled by the assur-ance that this was “the end…of the Beginning.”

The following year featured several more science fiction films, including Flight to Mars—a swashbuckling tale of the first flight to Mars, set fifty years in the future—and Pal’s production of another science fiction novel, When Worlds Collide (for which Bonestell served as technical advisor). More significantly, in September of 1951 Twentieth Century Fox released its own science fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. On the surface, Destination Moon and The Day the Earth Stood Still have little in common beside their classification as “science fiction.” But a closer reading of the films’ themes reveals a great deal about the state of many American minds in 1950. While Destination Moon celebrates the technology that will trans-port our heroes to the lunar surface, the concern that others might beat the Americans there, is, subliminally, the fear that Russia controls the same technologies—namely, nuclear power. And although Klaatu’s space ship in The Day the Earth Stood Still is a decidedly un-rocketlike saucer (designed by another architect, Frank Lloyd Wright), his message to the assembled world leaders and scientists is to use caution in wielding their newfound atomic power. The consequence of using atomic power as a weapon in space, Klaatu explains, is the demolition of the entire planet by a group of interstellar robot enforcers. In both films, atomic power is a threat, though not in itself; what is threatening about atomic power is both how it is used and by whom. Both films were a reminder that what set Americans apart from the rest of the world were the values of faith, sacrifice, and wisdom—beliefs that can only be acquired in a society that appreciates the necessity of tempering technology with a strong moral and religious code.

Amid these larger themes, Destination Moon was also about the end of the second age of astronomy, an event Ley defined in The Conquest of Space. In contrast to the first and second eras—the era of unassisted observation of the heavens, as with Kepler, and augmented observations with a telescope, as with Galileo—the third era of astronomy will be marked by personal explo-ration of the Moon and other planets (Ley and Bonestell 1949, 55–56). The third era of astronomy was a moment the world was collectively dreaming of, but it was also something science fiction had never convincingly staged until Destination Moon. In an almost clinical manner, Pal’s film illustrated what the first expedition to space would look like; it didn’t pander or turn



into a fantasy. It also had a “technically convincing feel” that made it seem like a “rehearsal for a future that was still almost twenty years away” (Corn and Horrigan 1984, 18). In its pragmatic approach to the future of space exploration, the film anticipated several aspects of the aerospace industry that developed over the next decade, including the rocket’s assembly at a plant in Southern California, and a dedicated launch port in New Mexico, near the White Sands Missile Range.16 The film was also amongst the first to feature a flying device that was not more fiction than fact, but instead was a recognizable ship that resembled real rockets built during the previous war, albeit by the Germans (Corn and Horrigan 1984, 18).

Perhaps one of the elements most responsible for Destination Moon’s success in the larger context of America’s burgeoning interest in space was that the “heroes” of the film were neither superheroes nor space aliens. They were regular American servicemen and engineers; in other words, they were the men who had recently fought in World War II, and designed the machinery that ultimately helped the Allies win the war. Thus, even while Destination Moon was a lone science fiction film in a business replete with Westerns, the men of the film represented a contemporary trope that dominated Western films in the 1950s and 1960s: the American confron-tation between the natural and the human realms, the battle between the untamed frontier and civilization. As Richard Slotkin writes in Gunslinger Nation, in the Western films that dominated the era (but is also in full force in Destination Moon) a borderline runs between West and East. In Westerns, the symbolic border is between the east coast and the western territories. In Destination Moon, however, the border is a changeable ten-sion between technology and government, Earth and the Moon, and the U.S. (West) versus a shady and implied Russian threat (East)—a “white versus red” conflict on a different scale. And as with Westerns during the 1950s and 1960s, it is through “this transgression of the borders”—Earth and Moon, West and East—that “the heroes reveal the meaning of the frontier line…In the process they evoke the elements in themselves (or in their society) that correspond to the ‘dark’; and by destroying the dark ele-ments and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and from the world” (Slotkin 1992, 351–352). The heroes are everymen who make the choice to pursue the virtuous (but more dangerous) path of the frontier, and by doing so preserve the “democratic values and practices” of

16. That NASA’s launch port ended up being located in Florida is a near miss. Thirty years later, the Space Shuttle Columbia, a space vehicle that bore a strong resemblance to the Luna, landed at White Sands.



the average American, while reconciling those values with “the imperatives of power” within Cold War policy (Slotkin 1992, 351–352).

Destination Moon certainly managed to capture the post-War, pro-industrial capitalism zeitgeist that was fueling America; it also displayed enough of the roughshod frontier temperament to hold its own against the influx of Westerns that Hollywood was turning out. The film, however, had something else, also. About the time that Bonestell was arguing with Heinlein over landing an expedition on Harpalus, and Pal was encourag-ing intelligent realism over effects, a sociologist was studying the lived reli-gion of post-War America. Will Herberg began to gather data on the pat-terns of American faith and religion for his 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew in the late 1940s, and noticed that in the first years after World War II there had been a series of interesting developments in American reli-gion. The old distinctions between religions, he found, were fading, and what was replacing them was not a lack of faith, but rather a flourishing of faith that seemed to have no object outside of the exercise of believing. Americans, Herberg discovered, believed better than any nation on Earth, despite sometimes appearing to lack an object for that belief (Herberg 1955, 260). The result was a nation that did not necessarily strongly iden-tify with any one particular religion. Its true religion was the civic religion of the American Way of Life (Herberg 1955, 88), a “common faith” that “validates culture and society…by assuring them that they constitute an unequivocal expression of ‘spiritual ideals’ and ‘religious values’ ” (Herberg 1955, 263). Perhaps, then, only a nation that had so quickly and so thor-oughly conflated its religiosity with civic purpose could have produced and believed in the science-based fiction presented in Destination Moon.

Early on in Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Herberg comments on the sudden, startling upswing in religious affiliation that began in the first years of the 1950s, and “represents an all-time high in religious identification” (Her-berg 1955, 46). The primary reason for this affiliation, Herberg concludes, is not only that religion is a symbol of “heritage,” but that religion is part of a larger shift toward belonging (Herberg 1955, 57). Because this sense of belonging was so inexorably tied to a method of resisting “Communist totalitarianism,” belonging and belief were both folded into the American Way of Life (Herberg 1955, 60). This civic religion, Herberg explains, “is the symbol by which Americans define themselves and establish their unity …if the American Way of Life had to be defined in one word, ‘democracy’ would undoubtedly be the word, but democracy in a peculiarly American sense” (Herberg 1955, 78). It is not “democracy” in the classic sense, but



instead a kind of reification of American democracy and American values, particularly in the face of Communism, and the older, even darker specter of Nazism. And this American festishization of the democracy and the religion of the American Way of Life finds its inner expression in the “magic of believing,” where faith is “a kind of ‘miracle drug’ that can cure all the ailments of the spirit. It is not faith in anything that is so powerful, just faith” (Herberg 1955, 89).

These two trends in religion—faith in faith and the American Way of Life—are writ large throughout Destination Moon. They appear in scenes ranging from Barnes’s plea to the industrialists to sponsor their journey, to Thayer’s declaration that the untested rocket will launch in seventeen hours, to Cargraves’s claiming the Moon for the United States (“and all mankind”), to Sweeney’s final near-sacrifice of himself for the sake of his crew and country. The moral rightness of reaching the Moon contains within it a kind of “national messianism,” because it is irrevocably tied to the project of living the American Way of Life (Herberg 1955, 264). When the industrialists recruited by Barnes and Thayer express skepticism that they should bankroll a project of this size and expense, Thayer replies with an explanation that the reason America should go to the Moon is that “[we] are not the only ones who know that the Moon can be reached. We’re not the only ones who are planning to go there. The race is on, and we’ better win it, because there is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer space. The first country that can use the Moon for the launching of missiles...will control the Earth.” This military reasoning is tempered by Barnes’s more existential answer to the same question: “I want to do this job because it’s never been done. Because I don’t know. It’s research, it’s pioneering. What’s the Moon? Another North Pole, another South Pole, our only satellite, our nearest neighbor in the sky.... It’s a venture that I don’t want to be left out of !” Thus both the answers to the question “why go to the Moon?” are variations on the lived American religion that Her-berg was chronicling. On the one hand, we should go to the Moon because it is an expression of American democracy—the core belief of the Ameri-can Way of Life. And on the other, we should go to the Moon because we have the requisite faith that we can get there.

While Thayer’s speech has achieved a kind of reverent recollection reserved for prophecy, it is Barnes’s speech which reveals that although the religious themes in Destination Moon are sublimated, they are no less present for their subtlety (McCurdy 1997, 67–68). From Barnes’s faith to Sweeney’s near self-sacrifice, the subliminal message of Destination Moon



is that the beating heart of a moon-shot will not be America’s mastery of technology: a Moon landing will come out of America’s faith that their way—morally and scientifically—is right. The bottom line of religion in the early 1950s, Herberg claims, was not so much piety as it was 1) the appearance of belonging, and 2) an outlet for the process or project of belief. Americans believe better than any nation on Earth—is it any won-der, then, that they also believe they can go to the Moon? It is in this man-ner that Destination Moon channeled the same myth as the hundreds of Western films, comic books, television shows, and radio programs of the Cold War era, which was the conquering of the frontier (any frontier) by courageous, ingenious Americans. It just so happened that George Pal’s epic documentary of the near future was set on the surface of the Moon, instead of the American west.

Thus, with the premier of Destination Moon, science fiction finally found a way out of the same old Buck Rogers loop and entered mainstream cin-ema by utilizing the myth of the American frontier. Thanks to the work of Chesley Bonestell and Robert A. Heinlein, the film took making outer space visible as an exercise in overcoming the unheimlich—the unfamiliar and unhomely—and negotiated the boundary between the known and the other. And after America had seen the surface of the Moon (and the inte-rior of Harpalus) there was no going back.

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The Greatest Adventure Awaiting Humankind: 'Destination Moon' and Faith in the Future

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