Destination Moon 2
Apr. 27th, 2005 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalThis is an idea that's been itching in the back of my skull for the past couple of weeks. Of all the movies that might be worthy of re-make, Destination Moon has the potential to be one of the least cringe-worthy, if it's properly handled. Most especially by endeavoring to make it as scientifically accurate using what we know today, much as it's predecessor was as scientifically accurate as they could manage in 1950.
Plot Elements that could carry over:
1. Idealistic Industrialist makes the case for a moon shot. In first film it was an aircraft manufacturer, backed up by a scientist and an ex-Army Air Force general. This time around it could be a sodding rich dot com executive (loosely based on the guy who sponsored SpaceShipOne), paired up with a bitter ex-NASA engineer and a Burt Rutan clone.
2. Launch vehicle is nuclear powered. I imagine this time around the ship would look like a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne, with a larger conventionally powered carrier aircraft to boost it to 50,000 ft. before letting the nuclear engine ignite.
3. Last minute attempt to stop the launch by the Guv'ment, backed by Shadowy Forces. In the original it was strongly implied that the Communists were actively sabotaging the program. This time around a less paranoid option would be anti-nuke activists who convince the NRC and NASA to intervene and cancel the launch. Depending on the tone of the screenplay, various characters could rail against NASA's hidebound ways and the idiocy of anti-nuke activists (thus putting the film on Jerry Pournelle's Top Ten Movies list)
4. Launch goes ahead after a hasty schedule change, barely beating out the guvment's stop order. There's a last minute crew change to allow the Guy From Brooklyn to come aboard and ask dumb science questions.
5. Some minor foulup occurs during the trip to the Moon, necessitating a space walk. Guy From Brooklyn screws up and has to be rescued from floating off into space after failing to secure his tether.
6. The Landing goes arwy. Like in the first movie, it can be that the initial landing site was suboptimal, nessitating a longer landing burn. The result is the same too; the crew doesn't have enough reaction mass to take off and escape the Moon's pull.
7. Which brings us to the Great Tearing the Ship Apart Scene. After some exploring, and perhaps a Momentous Discovery (ice water?), the crew starts pulling the ship apart to ditch enough weight to launch.
8. But they come up short. In the original film they solve the problem by MacGuyvering a way to throw out the last spacesuit. That might work again, or perhaps they can jury-rig a way to use the water-ice as reaction mass (in the original movie that *was* the reaction mass. Perhaps in this one the engine uses l-hyd.)
9. Big Safe Landing scene (unlike in the original, which ended with the takeoff from the Moon). The crew and the manufacturing company get a Presidential pardon for violating the NRC's stop order. :)
Plot Elements that could carry over:
1. Idealistic Industrialist makes the case for a moon shot. In first film it was an aircraft manufacturer, backed up by a scientist and an ex-Army Air Force general. This time around it could be a sodding rich dot com executive (loosely based on the guy who sponsored SpaceShipOne), paired up with a bitter ex-NASA engineer and a Burt Rutan clone.
2. Launch vehicle is nuclear powered. I imagine this time around the ship would look like a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne, with a larger conventionally powered carrier aircraft to boost it to 50,000 ft. before letting the nuclear engine ignite.
3. Last minute attempt to stop the launch by the Guv'ment, backed by Shadowy Forces. In the original it was strongly implied that the Communists were actively sabotaging the program. This time around a less paranoid option would be anti-nuke activists who convince the NRC and NASA to intervene and cancel the launch. Depending on the tone of the screenplay, various characters could rail against NASA's hidebound ways and the idiocy of anti-nuke activists (thus putting the film on Jerry Pournelle's Top Ten Movies list)
4. Launch goes ahead after a hasty schedule change, barely beating out the guvment's stop order. There's a last minute crew change to allow the Guy From Brooklyn to come aboard and ask dumb science questions.
5. Some minor foulup occurs during the trip to the Moon, necessitating a space walk. Guy From Brooklyn screws up and has to be rescued from floating off into space after failing to secure his tether.
6. The Landing goes arwy. Like in the first movie, it can be that the initial landing site was suboptimal, nessitating a longer landing burn. The result is the same too; the crew doesn't have enough reaction mass to take off and escape the Moon's pull.
7. Which brings us to the Great Tearing the Ship Apart Scene. After some exploring, and perhaps a Momentous Discovery (ice water?), the crew starts pulling the ship apart to ditch enough weight to launch.
8. But they come up short. In the original film they solve the problem by MacGuyvering a way to throw out the last spacesuit. That might work again, or perhaps they can jury-rig a way to use the water-ice as reaction mass (in the original movie that *was* the reaction mass. Perhaps in this one the engine uses l-hyd.)
9. Big Safe Landing scene (unlike in the original, which ended with the takeoff from the Moon). The crew and the manufacturing company get a Presidential pardon for violating the NRC's stop order. :)
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Not Brooklyn
Date: 2005-04-27 06:08 pm (UTC)Verne's.
Re: Not Brooklyn
Date: 2005-04-27 07:15 pm (UTC)Re: Not Brooklyn
Date: 2005-04-27 07:36 pm (UTC)Re: Not Brooklyn
Date: 2005-04-27 07:39 pm (UTC)Re: Not Brooklyn
Date: 2005-04-27 07:43 pm (UTC)Oh dear.
Date: 2005-04-28 05:36 pm (UTC)My point here, badly offered, was the need -- from the very get go of the genre -- for the un-informed out-of-towner. And since Verne was writing for a French audience that proxy was usually also French. A modern media producer picks on Brooklyn because that's the audience HE's aiming to reach.
Heinlein's Rocketship Galileo is a boy's adventure, in which trans-oceanic rockets are as common as Fords and souping up such a vehicle for a perviously unheard of moon-shot is just a matter of dedicated hot-rodding.
I believe Heinlein's technical work with RG was reprised in Destination Moon but the plot line is quite distinct. There's as much, and as much distinct, of the story The Man who Sold the Moon that carries into Destination Moon.
Re: Oh dear.
Date: 2005-04-28 05:50 pm (UTC)And I agree that we need the Guy From Brooklyn/France to explain things to the audience. It's just nowadays he'll have to explain completely different things, since modern audiences basically 'get' stuff like escaping the Earth's gravitational pull, and the need for spacesuits to have radios. (I'd probably still have GFB make the dumbass mistake of greasing the aerial though. That's sufficiently non-intuitive that an audience might be intrigued by the problem.)
I remember reading Heinlien's essay on the making of Destination Moon that originally appearing in Astounding. From the sounds of it, everything but the scientific principles from RG was dumped very early on.