The fiction of engineers

Editorial notebook

The flying-saucer hysteria that helped define 1950s pop culture can be credited with propelling the genre of science fiction into the mainstream of film.

Not that sci-fi was new to the big screen by then. By 1920, sci-fi classics like “Frankenstein,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” — and each is science fiction — had been adapted into silent films. Scifi movies remained popular throughout the ’30s and ’40s.

Then post-war — and more importantly, post-Roswell — America developed a taste for all things flying saucer, and this preference heavily influenced the array of cheaply made sci-fi schlock classics that dominated the ‘50s. Aliens intent on conquering Earth came to stand in for the Ruskies.

But sci-fi is so much more than “Alien” or “Star Wars.” Sometimes, the science takes top billing. Such was the case in 1950’s “Destination Moon,” based on the great Robert Heinlein’s 1947 novel “Rocket Ship Galileo.” There are no aliens in this story, no careening meteors or radioactive monsters emerging from the depths of the Pacific, no apocalyptic pandemics that turn mankind into zombies.

Despite these missing made-forthe-screen ingredients, the film — for which Heinlein contributed to the screenplay — is considered one of the best of the classic sci-fi bunch.

“Destination Moon” was one of the first serious science fiction films, emphasis on science. It depicts man’s original trip to the lunar surface at a time when NASA didn’t yet exist and the Air Force was in its infancy as a branch of the armed forces. In Heinlein’s take, private industry delivers the first men to the moon. (Mr. Heinlein was ahead of his time in many ways.) This was 1950, more than a decade before JFK called his famous moon shot and almost two decades before we made it there.

The story focuses on the science and technology necessary to enable a group of patriotic U.S. industrialists to fund the building of a rocket capable of delivering men to the moon.

It’s the prospect of aliens, of careening meteors and radioactive monsters that keep us glued to the stars. The ever-shifting and expanding New World promises treasures and surprises that surely surpass our imagination.

But it’s the daily grind that gets us to the point of payoff. “Destination Moon” gives us that touchdown (literal and otherwise), but mostly it chronicles the weeks of work that made liftoff possible. It does so with flare, venturing a guess as to what the liftoff of a moon rocket might entail, speculation on space walking, the physics of landing on and lifting off from the moon’s surface. Amid a wave of future material for Mystery Science Theater 3000, “Destination Moon” was ahead of its time.

Heinlein’s story falls into what C.S. Lewis considered the “Fiction of Engineers” subcategory of science fiction. The stuff of Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, in which science is the focus.

The moon is back in the sights of Earth-bound engineers working to bend gravity and physics so colleagues can be propelled 238,900 miles through the void to the lunar surface. Again. NASA’s Artemis program is on its way to returning us to the moon, and the work of its engineers is anything but fiction.