Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 313 - 2014-09 by vol 27 no 01 (v5.0) (epub)

Author:vol 27 no 01 (v5.0) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press
Published: 2014-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Patrick L. McGuire

The Most Accurate Space Movie Before Destination Moon

In 1936—seven years after 1929’s Die Frau im Mond and fourteen years before 1950’s Destination Moon—the Soviet studio Mosfilm brought forth its own depiction of a first lunar voyage, Kosmicheskiy reys. (The most common English translation of the title seems to be Cosmic Voyage, but Claude Mettavant has identified seven other English renderings in use. I might myself have proposed Journey into Space, but it is a little late now to be adding still more alternative English titles.) Die Frau im Mond had enlisted rocketry pioneers Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley as science advisers. Destination Moon once again used Oberth and also drew on the technical expertise of co-scriptwriter, Robert Heinlein. On paper, Kosmicheskiy reys would seem to have equaled or surpassed the others by bringing in Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, but in fact, as I explain below, the Russian pioneer’s actual participation in the film was small. Despite this, the Soviet film turned out to be at least as realistic as Die Frau im Mond about the experience of space travel while presenting a picture of the Moon more nearly in keeping with the science of the day. It thus set a scientific standard unsurpassed until Destination Moon—and even in 1950 one could debate whether the unrealistically energetic chemical fuel posited in Kosmicheskiy reys had greater or lesser plausibility than the highly speculative nuclear drive used in the American film.

Kosmicheskiy reys may have come with an original music track (see below), but it has no spoken dialog, just a few, relatively brief, caption cards. The film depicts how, in the summer of 1946, the All-Union Institute for Interplanetary Travel attempts the first crewed Moon launch. The spaceship, Iosef Stalin, moves by unspecified means out from a hangar and starts down a long launching track before igniting its own engines. It is numbered ussr-1 (sssr-1 in Russian, which, in the Cyrillic of the film, looks like cccp-1). The ship is actually called a “rocket plane,” raketoplan. The first stage does not exactly have wings as we might expect from something called a plane, but it does have two large fins running its length—looking, if viewed from head-on, like clock hands at the 10- and 2-o’clock positions. Underneath, at 6 o’clock, is a long fin, presumably a horizontal stabilizer. (The launching track has a gap down the middle to make room for the bottom fin.) I have severe doubts about the aerodynamics of this spaceship design, but evidently the idea is that the canted fins will provide lift so that the rocket thrust does not need to support the entire weight of ship while it is in atmosphere. (If so, some nonobvious mechanism must prevent it from lifting off the launching track prematurely.) At the edge of space, where the sky is already black and the stars shine, the huge first stage drops away, leaving the much smaller second stage to continue on to the Moon. The second stage has very large fins or

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