Rocketship X-M - Production

Production

The five explorers wear U. S. military surplus clothing, including overalls and aviator's leather jackets. It has been noted in other film reviews that while they are wearing gas masks, but gas masks would include goggles to protect the eyes; due to the thin Martian atmosphere, the explorers are actually wearing military Oxygen Breathing Apparatuses (OBA) like those used by military firefighters.

Various scientific curiosities and errors are seen during the film: With less than fifteen minutes to go until launch, the RX-M's crew are in the midst of a leisurely press conference being held at a base building. From its launch pad, the RX-M blasts straight up, and once it leaves the Earth's atmosphere, the ship makes a hard 90-degree turn to place the RX-M into Earth orbit. Simultaneously with the 90-degree turn, the crew cabin rotates within the RX-M's hull, around its lateral axis, so the ship's cabin deck is always "down"; the crew cabin's orientation is always shown like that of a flying airplane. Though objects are purposely shown to float free to demonstrate a lack of gravity, none of the five crew members float due to weightlessness. The RX-M's jettisoned second stage, with its engine still firing, and a later meteoroid storm (inaccurately referred to in dialog as meteorites) both make audible roaring sounds in the soundless vacuum of space that can heard inside the crew compartment. The clusters of those fast moving meteoroids appear to be identical in shape and detail (actually, the same prop meteoroid was shot from different angles and then optically printed in tandem, at different sizes, on the film's master negative). A point is made in dialog that the RX-M is carrying more than double the amount of rocket fuel and oxygen needed to make a successful round trip and landing on the Moon; while impractical for various reasons, this detail becomes a convenient, then necessary plot device in making the later Mars storyline more believable.

The RX-M's design was taken from rocket illustrations that appeared in an article in the January 17, 1949 issue of Life magazine. The interior structure of the spaceship's larger second stage is shown as having a long ladder that the crew must climb; it runs "up" through the RX-M's fuel compartment, which has on all sides a series by skinny fuel tanks filled with various propulsion chemicals. By selecting and mixing them together in various proportions, different levels of thrust are attainable from the RX-M's engines. The crew ladder ends at a round pressure hatch in the middle of a floor bulkhead that leads to the crew's upper living and control compartment.

Several scenes involving the interaction between the RX-M's sole female crew member, scientist Dr. Lisa Van Horn, the male crew, the launch staff, and the press corps provide cultural insights into early 1950s sexist attitudes toward women. One notable scene involves Van Horn and expedition leader (and fellow scientist) Dr. Karl Eckstrom rushing to recalculate fuel mixtures after their initial propulsion problems. When they come up with different figures, expedition leader Eckstrom insists they must proceed using his numbers. Van Horn objects to this arbitrary decision, but submits, and Eckstrom forgives her for "momentarily being a woman." Subsequent events prove Eckstrom's "arbitrary decision" to be wrong, placing their mission in jeopardy.

Lippert's feature was the first film drama to explore the dangers of nuclear warfare and atomic radiation through the lens of science fiction; these became recurrent themes in many 1950s science fiction films that followed.