their pressure suits, particularly when working around coral....It is good engineering and we present this new wrinkle in spacesuits without apology.14
Now, reading about an “establishing scene” (albeit a very brief one) to explain the design of the film’s spacesuits, some will discern misguided priorities, agreeing with Phil Hardy that “the script is colourless and wooden; the dominant concern of those involved was to make the journey to the Moon realistic rather than dramatic.”15 Yet it is infelicitous to describe the difference between Destination Moon and other space films in terms of “realism” versus “drama,” since we are actually dealing with two different types of drama: the brilliantly predicted drama of actual space travel versus the conventional drama of popular film.
That is, applying normal standards, one could easily claim that there is no “drama” in Destination Moon: there are no villains to overcome, no tensions between protagonists, no thwarted romances or comic misunderstandings. Yet there is a strong and definite conflict in this story—the conflict between frail human beings and the merciless hostility of outer space—and the critical weapon that people need to oppose this enemy is a spacesuit. With space cast as the opponent, a scene describing the spacesuits that the heroes will wear might be regarded as both interesting and necessary, a scene precisely equivalent to the well-loved introductory scenes in the James Bond films in which Q displays and explains the ingenious devices that Bond will use to battle his next foe. Attentiveness to the correct appearance of the spacesuit is also essential, for the same reason that a cowboy in a western film cannot be seen brandishing a toy gun: a hero’s weapons must look credible.
In a film that devoted so much energy to its spacesuits, it is only appropriate that its final crisis involves a spacesuit: seeking to reduce the weight of the rocketship so it can return to Earth, the astronauts craft an ingenious scheme to jettison the last spacesuit without endangering the life of Sweeney (Dick Wesson), the crewman wearing it. They tell him to drill a hole in the airlock, attach the suit to a line through the hole attached to an oxygen tank, quickly remove the suit while the air slowly leaks out, return to the ship, and have the suit fall out of the ship once the airlock door is reopened. Even removing a spacesuit, then, in certain circumstances, proves beneficial to human survival in space.
If Destination Moon remains an underappreciated film, that might stem from the fact that, as Hardy notes, “for the most part its predictions were remarkably accurate” (125). Its depictions of slow-moving astronauts outside the ship resemble films of actual space walks; its scenes of men walking on the Moon, as others have pointed out, eerily anticipate television coverage of the Apollo missions; and even the improvisational, spit-and-chewing-gum inventiveness of their solution to the weight problem mirrors the actual way that astronauts and engineers on the ground devised answers to problems like those of the Apollo 13 mission. People rarely watch Destination Moon today not because it is undramatic, but because they have regularly watched real-life video footage which conveys the same sense of authentic drama.
For the next eighteen years, no other space film quite matched the stark intensity of Destination Moon’s confrontation with space, though some spacesuit films of that era had moments of evocative power. Project Moonbase (1953), the lesser film that Heinlein made without George Pal, offered innovative scenes of weightlessness in a space station and an accident on the Moon, while Conquest of Space (1955), the lesser film that Pal made without Heinlein, presented an unusually austere portrait of astronauts on Mars. Other reasonably realistic and dignified spacesuit films of that era include Ivan Tors’ Riders to the Stars (1954), the almost unknown 12 to the Moon (1960), and the television series Men into Space (1959-1960). Displaying some—but not enough—concern for safety, The Angry Red Planet (1960) places spacesuited Martian explorers in what look like motorcycle helmets with faceplates, protecting their skulls from dangerous collisions but offering unpersuasive protection from the harsh Martian environment. In the 1960s, there emerged films purportedly about the actual space program; these tended to be farcical at first, like Moon Pilot (1962) and The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), but later a few such films aspired to gritty realism, like Countdown (1968) and Marooned (1969).
However, the greatest spacesuit film of this period—and, perhaps uncoincidentally, the greatest science fiction film of all time—was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The film took its subtitle seriously; 2001 is very much an odyssey within and through outer space, with co-creator Arthur C. Clarke, famed for his realistic science fiction, constantly on hand to ensure scientific accuracy. Our first glimpse of a person in the future, following the celebrated jump cut from bone to spaceship, is the sleeping Dr. Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester), wearing a spacesuit without a helmet, well prepared for any emergency during his flight to near-orbital space. Although Floyd’s stopover at the space station, with its comfortable chairs and Howard Johnson’s restaurant, may briefly give the impression that future space travel will be a safe and familiar experience, much like today’s air travel, subsequent events in the film decisively indicate that will not be the case, for Floyd is back in a full spacesuit for his spartan journey across the lunar surface to the unearthed monolith. A brief scene that usually provokes laughter—members of Floyd’s party form a group and pose for the camera in front of the monolith—conveys a serious message: space is an environment unlike that of Earth, and longstanding rituals and activities may no longer be appropriate or logical in this new environment. Here, it makes no sense to take a souvenir photograph to record someone’s visit to a noteworthy site when the person in the resulting photograph will appear entirely anonymous, virtually identical to all the other people wearing spacesuits. (The point was also made in Destination Moon when Sweeney, just photographed apparently holding up the Earth, complains, “Nobody will know it’s me in this diving suit.”16)
The film’s most significant spacesuit scene, of course, is the suspenseful episode when astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), leaving his spaceship in an unsuccessful effort to rescue fellow astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) drifting in space, is locked out by the rebellious computer HAL 9000 and forced to figure out how to get back into the spaceship before his power and oxygen run out. His plight stems from a critical lack of preparedness: hurrying to save his friend, Bowman neglected to put on his space helmet before piloting his tiny craft or “pod.” Drawing upon a vignette in his earlier story “The Other Side of the Sky” (1959), Clarke had Bowman come up with a startling solution: first, he opens a manual airlock; next, after positioning the pod by the airlock door, he opens the pod and exposes his body to the vacuum of space; then, since the rush of escaping air from the pod drives him into the airlock, he has a few seconds to reach and operate the manual control, closing the airlock and restoring oxygen to the chamber, before the exposure to space kills him. Thanks to his careful preparation, he manages to do exactly that; then, after finding and putting on a space helmet to guard against further threats, he proceeds to HAL’s memory chamber and methodically turns the machine off. While Sweeney briefly faced the same potential danger in the airlock of Destination Moon, Bowman’s chaotic moments in the airlock of 2001 represent the pinnacle of the spacesuit film, the only time on film when a human being comes into direct contact with outer space—and lives to tell the tale.
Considering this episode, and episodes in previous spacesuit films, we see that the environment of space radically alters several conventions of filmed narrative. A scene in space looks different: with an enveloping background of dark black space filled with sprinkles of white light, and foregrounded figures in white spacesuits (the usual color choice, despite the idiosyncratic bright colors of Destination Moon, since white best reflects heat), viewers essentially see a starkly black-and-white environment, even if the film is shot in color. A scene in space sounds different, since sound does not travel in space. Some films, like Project Moonbase, convey this by having no background noise whatsoever, a brief return to the silent film; in his space scenes, Kubrick provided only the sound of Bowman’s breathing—reminding viewers that, when you are deep in space, the only sound you will hear is the sound of your own breathing; and the scenes of Floyd on the moon, and
