Column Science Fiction Film Club Destination Moon: Both a Small Step and a Giant Leap for Sci Fi Cinema Robert Heinlein, George Pal, and Chesley Bonestell bring their vision of space to the silver screen… By Kali Wallace | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Destination Moon (1950). Directed by Irving Pichel. Written by Rip Van Ronkel, Robert A. Heinlein, and James O’Hanlon. Starring John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, and Dick Wesson. Nobody asked, but I’m going to start with a brief history of the untethered spacewalk. The first time an astronaut planned to do an untethered extravehicular activity (EVA) in space was in 1966. Eugene Cernan, a member of the Gemini 9A mission, was supposed to test a self-contained rocket pack, but the test was canceled when he became fatigued and overheated during the spacewalk. The first actual untethered EVAs didn’t happen in 1984, performed first by Bruce McCandless, then Robert Stewart, during a mission aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. They both used a device called a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) to move about in space outside the shuttle. That wonderful, famous photograph of an astronaut floating free with the Earth in the background is McCandless. (The picture was taken by the shuttle’s pilot, Captain Robert “Hoot” Gibson.) The MMU was used a couple more times during 1984 for untethered spacewalks, but after that it was retired. It would be a decade before its replacement, the smaller Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER) device, was tested by astronauts Mark Lee and Carl Meade on a Space Shuttle Discovery flight in 1994. That device has been used a couple of times since then, but overall, in the real world, there have been a very small number of untethered spacewalks, and all of them have been planned and executed while making use of equipment specifically designed to allow the astronauts to maneuver in space. In movies, on the other hand, astronauts are constantly just randomly detaching themselves from their spaceships willy-nilly during spacewalks and going all shockedpikachu.gif when they find themselves at the center of a dramatic set-piece in need of rescue, or doomed to float away forever. And it drives me crazy. Every time! I haven’t been keeping count of how many movies have such a scene, but it’s too many. We all have our sci fi nitpicking bugbears, and this is mine. Detached in space because of catastrophic accident or malevolent force: okay, good drama, keep ’em coming. Detached in space because the characters needlessly unhook themselves to create narrative tension: please stop. When it happened in Destination Moon I literally said out loud, “Oh, come on!” even though there was nobody nearby to hear my frustration except my cats, who do not care, and kept right on not caring as I explained that the space travelers could have just used their second rope instead of engaging in a bit of melodramatic free fallin’. That moment and my reaction to it is a pretty good encapsulation of my experience watching Destination Moon, a movie that tries very hard and gets a lot of things right, but also constantly sabotages its own efforts. Destination Moon was produced by puppeteer-turned-filmmaker George Pal, whose work we have seen before with War of the Worlds (1953)and The Time Machine (1960), the latter of which he also directed. It was his experience with fun, quirky animation that started Pal’s career as a producer. On the strength of his career making animated shorts, Pal convinced the independent studio Eagle-Lion Films to finance two feature films. The first feature was The Great Rupert (1950), which according to Wikipedia is a heartwarming family film about “a little animated squirrel who, with much charm, accidentally helps two economically distressed families overcome their obstacles.” The second feature was Destination Moon, which does not feature a dancing squirrel. Pal was new to feature-length, live-action films, but both movies were directed by Hollywood veteran Irving Pichel, a prolific actor and director. Pichel was one of those classic Hollywood men of the studio era. He started out acting in theater, then switch to film with the advent of sound movies. His first film as director was RKO Pictures’ The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which he co-directed with King Kong (1933) co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack. The Most Dangerous Game was King Kong’s slightly older sibling, as it also starred Fay Wray and was filmed on the same sound stage with the same jungle sets. Pichel, who was Jewish, would spend the next twenty years both acting and directing in dozens of movies in just about every genre, including a number of explicitly anti-Nazi films. In 1947, he was named as one of the so-called Hollywood Nineteen suspected of being a Communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He wasn’t one of the ten called to testify, but the ordeal still impacted his career. The blacklist and associated turmoil eventually led to him leaving the United States for the last few years of his life (he died in 1954), but not before filming a few more movies, including both films he made with Pal. There are some mildly conflicting accounts out there about how Destination Moon came about. I can’t prove that the differing accounts depend on whether a person has read a George Pal biography or a Robert Heinlein biography, but those articles that do cite sources lead me to suspect that is behind at least some of the lack of clarity. So I’m not going to try to figure out the precise timeline of who did what and why. At some point in the late 1940s, Heinlein and screenwriter Rip Van Ronkel put together a script for a film about a trip to the Moon, and at some point in that process the story included aspects of Heinlein’s novels Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) and The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949), and at some point Pal got involved and spent a lot of time trying to find a studio to take on the project before finally forming his own production company to get started in feature films. Here is where I shamelessly cheat at my job. You know I love talking about how films are made, but there are some times when somebody else has already done it, and they’ve done it so well, from first-person experience, that it feels downright silly for me to rehash everything they’ve said. In the July 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, Heinlein published a long, detailed, and enjoyable piece all about the movie’s production. All about it: the funding, the choice of filming locations and styles, the consultation of countless scientific and technological experts, the spacesuits, the zero-gravity special effects, the debates they had over what a believable control panel would look like, how to represent the vast surface of the Moon within the confines of a sound stage, and so much more. It’s a great piece. I highly recommend it, especially for a look at how much problem solving, trial and error, and scientific extrapolation was involved in making the film. One bit I find particularly interesting is this: “The greatest single difficulty we encountered in trying to fake realistically the conditions of space flight was in producing the brilliant starry sky of empty space. In the first place nobody knows what stars look like out in space; it is not even known for sure whether twinkling takes place in the eye or in the atmosphere. There is plausible theory each way.” This was 1950, eleven years before the first successful human spaceflight. There had been cameras launched into space, but mostly for the purpose of looking at Earth; the first photo taken in space was taken by a camera mounted on an American V-2 rocket in 1946. At the time, we really didn’t know what space looked like from, well, space, and an important aspect of telling a sci fi story is knowing what you don’t know. Another important aspect is knowing the limitations of your chosen medium. How do you film scenes set in space and on the Moon when you can’t go to the Moon, you don’t know what space looks like, and you can’t use CGI because it’s 1950 and computers are still pretty much only useful for calculating and code-breaking? For example, in order to film the zero-gravity scenes where the crew move about the spaceship at different angles, special effects engineer Lee Zavitz built the entire set into a mechanical contraption that allowed it to be rotated in different directions. This is the same solution 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) would use, and with it came the same additional problem of being so loud the sound inevitably had to be dubbed over the scenes. Heinlein was just one of the many experts brought on to assure Destination Moon’s scientific accuracy. Another expert whose fingerprints are over the film is Chesley Bonestell, the artist whose iconic paintings are universally acknowledged to have helped inspire American interest in and love for space. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve almost certainly seen Bonestell’s work. Bonestell had been interested in space—and in painting images of space—from a very young age, but he spent several years as an architect first, as is the way of many artists trying to please parents who want them to have practical careers. During that time he helped design the art deco façade of the Chrysler Building; those amazing eagle gargoyles are his work. He eventually moved to Hollywood to work as a matte painter in the film industry. Among other things, he painted the background images of the cathedral in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and the Welsh countryside in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941), and he worked on Xanadu in Citizen Kane (1941) alongside lead matte painter Mario Larrinaga, whose work we’ve seen previously in King Kong. But Bonestell never lost his love of space, however, and in the May 1944 issue of LIFE Magazine, he published a series of paintings of Saturn, including one of the most famous space paintings ever: Saturn as Seen From Titan. Those paintings, published when our best images of Saturn were fuzzy observatory photos, captured the public imagination immediately. Bonestell went on to collaborate with science writer Willy Ley (the same man who worked with Fritz Lang on Woman in the Moon [1929]) on a book called The Conquest of Space (1949), which paired Bonestell’s paintings of space with speculation about how we might travel there someday. The book caught George Pal’s attention and led to him ask Bonestell to consult on Destination Moon. A few years later, Pal would also make a movie called Conquest of Space (1955), which is about traveling to Mars, and once again Bonestell would create the matte paintings. Bonestell was a traditional painter; he painted oil on board, landscape realism with a bit of the aesthetic of the 19th century American Romanticists. But he also often adapted techniques from his architecture career and his time in Hollywood to imagine worlds nobody had ever visited. He would often build models or miniatures to use as references, and that was part of his process for creating the lunar landscape in Destination Moon. According to Heinlein in his Amazing Stories article, Bonestell vetoed his first choice for the film’s landing location. Heinlein suggested the crater Aristarchus, but Bonestell wanted a crater that fit a very particular set of parameters: wall height, distance to horizon, and a lunar location that would allow Earth to be visible fairly low in the sky. Bonestell searched the Moon’s geography until he found a location that worked. Destination Moon’s lunar scenes take place in the crater Harpalus, which is located in the Moon’s northern hemisphere. Heinlein explains, “Having selected it, Mr. Bonestell made a model of it on his dining room table, using beaver board, plasticine, tissue paper, paint, anything at hand.” (I had to look it up: beaverboard is a specific type of engineered wood made out of pulp, an early 20th century predecessor to MDF.) Bonestell then used a pinhole camera to photograph a panorama of the model from the correct angle, magnified that image, and painted a twenty-foot-wide and two-foot-tall painting of the scene. That painting was then photographed, blown up again, and repainted from a lower angle, so that the movie would be able to show the lunar landscape from atop the rocket and from on the ground. For the record: Bonestell objected quite strongly to the addition of mudcracks to the lunar surface. He knew, and told Pal and Pichel, that there could not be mud on the Moon, because there was no water on the Moon. But the filmmakers wanted to show the perspective, so they wanted the ground to have visible texture receding into the distance. There are so many anecdotes like that from the production. A tremendous amount of creativity, ingenuity, and craftsmanship, from a lot of very smart people, went into making Destination Moon as scientifically plausible as it could be, in a time where most of the science involved quite a lot of speculation. So it’s unfortunate that the movie as a whole is rather boring. Alas. But it really is often quite boring. Yes, it has some moments of excitement. The silly unhook-the-tether-outside-the-spaceship scene is nicely tense, and I genuinely didn’t know if all the astronauts were going to make it off the Moon’s surface at the end. But the movie suffers from a lack of appealing characters and flounders when it swings too far into the didactic. Every scene where Barnes (John Archer), Cargraves (Warner Anderson), and Thayer (Tom Powers) explain the basics of space travel to Sweeney (Dick Wesson, in his first film role) strain credulity, and there is only so much strain one can handle before it becomes a bit tiresome. Heinlein wrote about the pressure to make the movie more palatable to general audiences, so that may have been part of it. But some of it is Heinlein just being Heinlein and using uninteresting characters as avatars for solving interesting problems. There is also a problem of expectation, as so many of the articles that talk about this film in conjunction with Rocketship X-M (1950)—the film that was filmed and released specifically to capitalize on the hype for Destination Moon—state without elaboration that Destination Moon is the serious, high-budget film and Rocketship X-M is the silly, low-budget film. But Rocketship X-M is a movie about nuclear annihilation in which the main cast all tragically die by the end, whereas Destination Moon has a lengthy scene in which Woody Woodpecker explains rocket science to a roomful of rich industrialists who think that prohibitions against nuclear testing are mere bureaucratic red tape stifling their profitable innovation. I agree that one of those is very serious and one is unserious. I just don’t agree that the distinction has anything to do with the accuracy of the science in the films. I appreciate that part of the film’s intended purpose was to spark interest in space travel by proving that it was both realistic and possible, and I am also aware that I can’t fully appreciate just what that meant in 1950, as somebody born nearly a decade after the first Moon landing. Contemporary reviews of the movie don’t really provide much clarity, as many, such as the one from The New York Times, seem to offer the same ambivalence. I think, in the end, I am more fascinated by the existence of Destination Moon than by the film itself. I like that it showcases a rare post-WWII optimism about science and exploration, but I don’t like that it thinks rich men operating outside governmental oversight are the way to achieve that. I love how much craftsmanship and ingenuity went into the production, but I wish the same care had extended to the storytelling and the characters. What do you think of Destination Moon? How do you think it fits into the crowd of post-WWII sci fi movies about space travel? [One final note: There is actually an explanation for the Woody Woodpecker scene, it’s just not a very interesting one. Pal was friends with Woody’s creator, Walter Lantz.] Next week: We’re going both forward and backward in time with First Men in the Moon (1964), an adaptation of the 1901 H.G. Wells novel. You can watch it several places online, including an authorized free version on YouTube.[end-mark] The post <i>Destination Moon</i>: Both a Small Step and a Giant Leap for Sci Fi Cinema appeared first on Reactor.