This week my obsession with the way we used to see the future takes me to Earth’s moon.
One of the most interesting things about old science fiction is what it reveals about the way people of its time viewed the future. In 1975 people had a very different and more optimistic view of the future than the one we have now. That optimism was best expressed in the now all but forgotten television series Space: 1999.
Six years after Apollo 11’s historic 1969 landing on the moon it seemed as though man was taking the first step to something bigger and grander. The other science fiction being produced around that period, with shows like Logan’s Run and UFO, had a wilder approach to what was coming.
By comparison Gerry Anderson’s British produced television series Space: 1999 took a conservative approach to what man might accomplish in the depths of space. Yet even Gerry’s view, realistic though it strove to be, turned out to be far too optimistic.
Still, in 1975 it seemed entirely plausible that man would have a permanent base on the lunar surface within the next 25 years. So Anderson set out to make a show based in what, at least then, seemed like an inevitable future.
Martin Landau Was The Star Of Space: 1999
By the time Space: 1999 was produced, its star Martin Landau was already a well known actor. He’d been in movies like North by Northwest and The Gazebo. You probably know him best from his roles in movies like Ed Wood or Rounders.
Martin Landau was a good get for the show, enough to keep it running for two seasons. And enough to justify a big budget for the project.
Space: 1999, was, at the time, the most expensive television program ever made. It put that production money into building a future which, at the time, seemed realistic enough that it should have happened. It didn’t, but the truth is that, aside from all the sleeve zippers, this is the world we should be living in right now.
Accurate Predictions Of The Future Made Inaccurate By Human Incompetence
Establishing a base on the lunar surface, maybe even a base just like Moonbase Alpha, would have been completely plausible by 1999 had NASA continued to receive the kind of funding it deserved. Instead, after Apollo 11 America’s interest in exploring the cosmos waned and so did our government’s willingness to spend money on it.
Part of the problem, as it turns out, is that there just isn’t any profit in it. The moon’s a barren wilderness and we’ve yet to find anything worth going through all the trouble to go up there and get.
Space: 1999 tries to clear this obstacle by presenting the moon as a reasonable solution to the world’s waste storage problem. That might have made sense if the cost of launching material into space reached manageable levels. Unfortunately, despite huge advancements in rocket reusability from companies like SpaceX, the cost to send anything into space, let alone radioactive waste, remains prohibitively high.
Space: 1999 Gets Almost Everything Right
Space: 1999 stayed on the air for two seasons and 48 episodes. At the time critics praised it, though as you’d expect scientists and science fiction authors alike were a little less than enthused with the whole “launching the moon out of orbit with a nuclear reaction” premise. Even in the seventies, that didn’t make a lot of sense.
Yet so much of the rest of the show is well thought out, right down to the G-forces when the moon’s blasted out of orbit, it’s easy to forgive them that one big piece of ridiculousness.In an era where most science fiction predicted a future that was largely a wild fantasy, like the stuff of Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers, Anderson’s series deserves praise for almost getting it right.
Actually, I insist that he did get it right. Space: 1999 is the world we should be living in, we’re the ones who got it wrong.
How To Watch Space: 1999
Happily, Space: 1999 is now basically free to stream almost everywhere, including right on YouTube. You can start watching right here.
If you take the time to check it out, leave us a comment and let us know what you think.