Spacemens Luck

 

Where Tom Corbett, Captain Video, CMDR Corry and Other Spacemen Still Live

The state of America’s manned space travel program today is in disarray. With the US having no spaceship in it’s fleet capable of carrying personnel into space. And the only other means for American’s to get into space is via the Russian space fleet which has been temporarily (Hopefully) de-certified due to the failure of last weeks cargo flight to the ISS space station.

The reason we are in this position is because our national leadership has failed to keep their eye on the ball over the last ten or fifteen years and allowed our space program to decline to the point it is today.

What prompted me to right this article is I came across a classic failed pilot for a CBS TV series from 1959 named “Destination Space”. The movie over all is standard science fiction for day. But what I found interesting was the speech before a congressional sub-committee criticizing the congress and other leaders on their leadership in the space program. It is to my knowledge the first time that space travel was shown in a plausible political context that is relevant to this day. A leader of the congressional sub-committee suggests that space travel was not just a technological triumph and a great adventure but also costly and that financial justification is an important consideration as well.

I regret that there was only this one pilot episode and not at least one season of the show made. The film used a lot of stock footage from the earlier 1955 space travel movie “Conquest of Space”. Specifically the views of the “The Wheel” (space station) and the spaceship which is bound for the moon. In the source movie of the stock footage “Conquest of Space” A team of American astronauts leave their space station on the first mission to Mars.

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Dimension X

Based on the short story by Frederick Brown the story starts and ends with “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

The show’s announcer begins by saying “a sweet blood curdling story that is only two sentences long. The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” The story goes on and elaborates on those two sentences and builds a more complete story around them.

The story is about Walter Phelan, the last man on Earth. An Immortal space faring race calling themselves the Zan have invaded the earth and have killed off all life other than pairs of animal specimens for their zoo.

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2000 Plus

At an unknown time in the far distant future The Master Mechanical Brain with their robot police have taken over Mech City. Mech City is a domed city where robots do everything for the humans. It is not said but the story infers that this is the only human outpost left on earth. A man named Morton, who has developed a Master Mechanical Brain, has plans of human genocide, planning only to spare a few re-adjusted humans.

This story is about a rebellion among a few humans led by Bob Thomas, who resents Morton and the Master Controller for having Mech City transformed into a complete machine civilization. The Robot Mind Police Patrol the city and search for the remaining human inhabitants who are not re-adjusted.

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