Plot
When their latest V-2 rocket test fails and government funding collapses, rocket scientist Dr. Charles Cargraves (Warner Anderson) and space enthusiast General Thayer (Tom Powers) enlist the aid of aircraft magnate Jim Barnes (John Archer). With the necessary millions raised from a group of adventurous and patriotic industrialists, they build a ship at a desert base, but the project is threatened by a public uproar over radiation safety. The three idealists circumvent legal efforts to stop their project by launching ahead of schedule with a substitute radio operator, Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson). In space, they almost lose a crewman when they go outside the ship to free a frozen radio antenna. The landing uses up too much fuel, and after exploring the surface they discover that they must lighten the ship if their remaining fuel is to get them back. No matter how much equipment they throw overboard, it looks as though someone will have to stay behind if the other three are to return to the Earth. However, they manage to lift off from the Moon and make it back to home.
The film features the premise that US private industry will finance and manufacture the first spacecraft to reach the moon, given the Soviet threat at the time, and then the US government will bring itself to buy or lease the technology. Visionary industrialists are shown cooperating to support the venture.
Read more about this topic: Destination Moon (film)
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)