Destination Moon
As a kid in 1950, my family and I lived on a farm in Washington County, so I did not see many movies. But that year we went to the relatively new Ozark Theater on College Avenue in Fayetteville to see Destination Moon. (This movie, in color, envisions the first human mission to land on the moon, at a time before humans were actually sending rockets into space. As with the later, real human lunar missions, there were issues galore in getting there and back.)
In 1950, I knew nothing about rockets or space travel, and the Moon was that silvery object in the sky. I was enthralled by this movie and the new world it opened up to me! I became interested in space and planets, and in science. So interested, that I earned three degrees in chemistry at the University of Arkansas and did my PhD dissertation work on meteorites. After a two-year study in planetary sciences at Cal Tech in California, I became a research scientist at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. My first responsibility was to help prepare one of the science labs in the newly-built NASA Lunar Receiving Laboratory for the return and quarantine examination of the very first samples of lunar material brought back by the Apollo 11 astronauts.
Here I was, some 18 years after Destination Moon, the movie that initiated my interest in space and science, participating in the actual first mission to land humans on the Moon and return samples for study. And it was exciting! I spent 45 years as a NASA research scientist, and much of that time doing research on lunar materials. I often thought about the movie Destination Moon, and how in reality some details were very different and some rather similar. Then my wife and I retired to Northwest Arkansas, where I still occasionally look at the moon.