How Hollywood Inspires the Exploration of Space - ACS Publications

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Chapter 25

How Hollywood Inspires the Exploration of Space Randii R. Wessen* Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Pasadena, California 91109 *E-mail: [email protected]

Science fiction takes us to the future and to worlds yet to be discovered, but science fiction is much more than just entertainment. It is a communication device that gives us a glimpse of what could be. The master of this communication technique is Hollywood. Their scope ranges from documentaries, to non-fiction, to the very essence of imagination, fiction. These fictional stories, if done correctly, guide scientists and engineers to consider realities that currently don’t exist…but could. All one has to do is scan the science fiction stories of the 1950s to see that much of their imagined capabilities are in existence today. Communication satellites in geostationary orbit, humans landing on the Moon, space stations, and interplanetary travel all started as fiction. Science fiction is not a luxury but a societal necessity. Science cannot move forward without some idea of what future state must be proved or disproved. Fundamental research has to make a hypothesis, which is its own kind of science fiction, which can be tested through the scientific method. Realities of today have many technologies first articulated in fiction. Even the names of these technologies are sometimes taken from the science fiction as a kind of tribute. Hollywood entertains all of us, but its inspiration is what helps us develop tomorrow.

© 2013 American Chemical Society In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


Introduction Marvins, Lukes, Hals, and, of course, Kirks were everywhere. When one walks down the halls of the operations buildings at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and peers into offices, one is more likely to find Marvin the Martian dolls, Star War’s Millennium Falcon models, 2001: A Space Odyssey movie posters, or Star Trek memorabilia then you are to find NASA logos, Caltech coffee mugs or MIT notebooks. The reason for this is, that, as kids, we all watched science fiction on television, in the theaters, or both. These shows were more than just mindless images flickering at 24 frames per second, but rather adventures that took us to new worlds. These experiences had very profound effects on our interests, our education, and, ultimately, our careers. Today at NASA, all of us were, and still are, deeply moved by technical engineering endeavors like the Mercury Program to launch humans into space, the Gemini Program to develop space faring technologies, the Apollo Program to land humans on the Moon and the Space Shuttle Program to attempt to make space travel routine. We were also moved by 20th Century Fox’s Lost in Space, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and who doesn’t remember Robby the Robot from the classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet (Figure 1)? One particular Science Planning Manager for the Cassini Saturn Mission had so many Star Trek action figures that his office looked more like the apartment of Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter on The Big Bang Theory than an office for a NASA flagship mission (Figure 2). That manager, Brian Paczkowski, shares, “I grew up during the Gemini and Apollo era of manned spacecraft, which was very inspirational for me and helped direct my career goals - I wanted to be involved, in any way, with the space program! At the same time, I got to experience the awe and wonder of what the future could be like with every new episode of the original Star Trek. This combination motivated me to pursue a science and engineering degree in college and, ultimately, a career with NASA.”

The Importance of Science Fiction Science fiction is the logical extrapolation of what is known today. Good science fiction does not include things that are impossible or at least tries to keep the number of impossible things to a minimum. “Impossible” means something that “violates the laws of nature.” As an example of what is or isn’t possible, it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. On the other hand, can humans live to be 400 years old? The answer is yes. It doesn’t violate a law of nature, we just don’t know how to achieve it. Sometimes, some aspects of a science fiction plot must violate “what is impossible” in order to create a story. Science fiction adventures sometimes use faster-than-light travel because the distances between stars are so vast. A space thriller at another world in another Solar System must assume that we can get there in a reasonable amount of time before the story can be told.

300 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


Figure 1. Robby the Robot, from the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet, poses at the 2006 San Diego Comic Con in honor of the 50th anniversary of his appearance in that movie. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Unfortunately, the general public does not realize just how far away other stars are from our Sun. To illustrate this, we’ll use objects built by humans that are the most distant things humanity ever built, namely the Voyager spacecraft (Figure 3). These two ambassadors from Earth are traveling at about 1,000,000 miles every day. Traveling at those speeds, Voyager would take approximately 78,000 years to get to the closest star to our Sun…and neither of the Voyagers are even traveling in that direction! And the stars themselves travel through space faster than any spacecraft people have ever built! However, if storytellers cannot write about “warp drive,” traveling faster than the speed of light, then many stories can’t even be written.



Figure 2. Evidence that television series like Star Trek and Doctor Who, as well as movies like Star Wars, influence space exploration is ubiquitous in the office of personnel on the Cassini/Huygens Mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Courtesy Kevin Grazier.

Science fiction, whether in books, on television, or in movies give us a brief glimpse of what tomorrow can be. It teaches us how to imagine. Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Though we really need to be able to acquire knowledge, there can be no increase in knowledge without imagination. Without imagination, there is no creativity. Our mind’s eye must be able to consider a future possibility before we can attempt to make it a reality, and that’s where scientists, engineers, artists, futurists, and the leader of creativity, Hollywood, comes in. Hollywood is all about imagination. Filmmakers make “real” that which no longer exists, that which could’ve existed, or that which could possibly exist sometime in the future. 302 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


Figure 3. The Voyager spacecraft with its science boom and radioisotope thermoelectric power supply deployed. Courtesy NASA/JPL/Caltech.

When Hollywood and Science Join Forces One of the more successful engineering and artistic collaborations was between Wernher von Braun, the chief architect of the Apollo Program to the Moon, and Walt Disney, the father of Mickey Mouse and the creator of the Walt Disney Corporation. It is no secret that the Disney Corporation was, and still is, in the business of imagination for the purpose of entertaining and educating people. Both von Braun and Walt Disney (Figure 4) realized that media (TV and film) were powerful tools to entertain and inform. In the 1950s von Braun and Disney teamed up to produce three space-related TV shows. The Disney Corporation produced and visualized the shows while von Braun provided the scientific content. On March 9, 1955, the first show entitled Man in Space aired on television (1). The main thrust of the show was the possibility that a passenger rocket could be designed, built and operated within 10 years. Although it took more than fifty years, the show correctly predicted the advent of commercial spaceflight. Today humans have paid for trips into space and many companies are working on rockets to launch people into low Earth orbit on a regular basis. The individual that has the honor of being the first commercial astronaut belongs to Dennis Tito (Figure 5), an ex-engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2). In the 1960s, Mr. Tito, using his mathematical skills in orbital mechanics, applied them to investing. His financial skills grew so great that he eventually left the Laboratory to start his own investment company. Using his own funds, Mr. Tito was launched to the International Space Station on April 28, 2001 aboard a Russian rocket. 303 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


Figure 4. Wernher von Braun (right) posing with Walt Disney (left) in front of a model of a German V-2 rocket. Courtesy NASA.

In addition, the first commercial rocket company, Virgin Galactic established by Richard Branson was founded in 2004, will start routine commercial suborbital missions sometime before 2015 (3). Though these flights will not make it to orbit, it does bring von Braun’s dream of commercial spaceflight that much closer to reality. In addition, many other commercial companies are developing humanrated spacecraft to take paying customers to low Earth orbit. It’s just a matter of time when the general public will be able to have their vacations in space, and then sometime later, vacations on the Moon. The second von Braun/Disney space episode was aired on December 28, 1955 and was entitled Man in the Moon and highlighted a space station around the Earth with human missions to our natural satellite (1). Today, that space station is a reality and is called the International Space Station (ISS) (Figure 6). The ISS is now the residence for six astronauts and cosmonauts and orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes. It has had a permanent human presence in space since October 2000 and is now a major international research laboratory (4).



Figure 5. The Soyuz TM-32 crew. From left to right Dennis Tito, Commander Talgat Musabayev, and Flight Engineer Yuri Baturin. Mr. Tito spent 7 days, 22 hours and 4 minutes in space (3). Courtesy NASA.

Figure 6. An image of the International Space Station as seen from the Space Shuttle Endeavor (Mission STS-134) as it began its journey back to Earth. Courtesy NASA. 305 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


As for sending humans to the Moon, that was accomplished with the Apollo 11 mission which had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin successfully land the Eagle lunar lander on its surface (Figure 7). Five other 2-person crews followed but the economics for sending humans to the Moon were just not there. The Apollo Program ended in 1972 with the completion of the Apollo 17 mission. However, this is not the end of human exploration of the Moon. Humans will eventually return when the technology becomes cheaper, the engineering becomes safer and the economic reasons for working on the Moon become more profitable. In the year 2013 these conditions have not been meet, but it’s getting closer. I tell my children that they will be the last generation of human beings to say, “I remember looking up at the Moon when there were no city lights on it.” Von Braun was right about the space station and human trips to the Moon, however, his estimate of when this would be accomplished was off by more than a half century. That error does not reduce the value of dreaming or reduce the need for imagination. Rather, imagination is the first step needed to socialize humanity with a new idea. After all, many people felt that landing a human on the Moon was impossible (not the proper use of the word). After the success of the Apollo 11 mission, landing humans on the Moon’s surface was not only possible but by the end of the Apollo 17 mission, had became routine. We used our imagination to dream about landing humans on the Moon. Because of the Apollo Program, we no longer have to dream about it, we’ve already done it. Now we only have to wait for the economic conditions to “turn positive.”

Figure 7. Neil Armstrong on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Courtesy NASA. 306 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


The final von Braun/Disney episode aired on December 4, 1957 and featured the prospect of a nuclear powered spacecraft (1). Nuclear-powered spacecraft have been dreamt about for decades. The first technical treatment of such a craft was called Project Orion and was studied by engineers in the 1950s at Los Alamos Laboratory (5). It is clear that von Braun was not the first to think of this type of rocket, but he was the first to propose one for the general public with the help of Walt Disney. Nuclear power offers humanity a way to far exceed the current capability of liquid-fueled chemical rockets. More recently Star Wars, created by George Lucas, used TIE Fighter spacecraft to fight for the evil Empire. The acronym “TIE” was not an imaginary 3-letter acronym but rather an acronym for a very plausible “Twin Ion Engine” concept (6). Ion engines, sometimes referred to as electric propulsion, use charged particles electrically accelerated out of its engine rather than the chemical explosion of a fuel and an oxidizer. They have been used for decades for station-keeping on Earth-orbiting satellites. An ion engine was finally space-qualified (Figure 8) as a main propulsion system 27 years after the first Star Wars movie with the launch of Deep Space 1 (DS1) on October 28, 1998 (7). DS1 validated a xenon solar electric propulsion engine. Since then the Japanese have used “ion-drive” for their Hayabusa spacecraft to return samples from asteroid Itokawa (8). Today the United States Dawn spacecraft is using ion-drive to achieve a space exploration “double header.” Dawn will orbit two of the major asteroids in the Solar System. The craft has already completed its Vesta portion of the mission and is now heading for a 2015 rendezvous with Ceres, the largest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt (9).

Figure 8. Testing of Deep Space 1’s NSTAR ion thruster. This “hot fire” test at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was used to validate the function of this thruster. Courtesy NASA/JPL/Caltech. 307 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


Science Meets Science Fiction Though scientists and engineers use nature and physics to guide their imagination, many ideas are first born out of fiction. It doesn’t matter if its written, animated or filmed. The result is the same. It directs the imagination to consider places that do not exist…but could. Sometimes the idea is so far ahead of its time that decades must pass before the technology of the day can catch up to the fiction. Sometimes the science fiction is so technically correct that when the capabilities of the day do catch up, the new technology is given the name used in the fictional story because it was “done right.” For an example of how reality can mirror fiction, one only has to read Jules Verne’s De la Terra a la Lune (French for “From Earth to the Moon”) written more than a hundred years before the Apollo Program (10). In Verne’s timeless story, members of the Gun Club decide to launch individuals to the Moon with a huge cannon. The cannon was built at Stone’s Hill Florida, exceedingly close to what is today the Kennedy Space Center. As if this wasn’t enough of a coincidence, both the cannon’s human-carrying projectile and the Apollo 11 spacecraft were both called “Columbia”; they both had a crew of three; and both ended their mission with a splashdown in the Pacific. Still, Verne’s story is just one of many examples of these ‘coincidences.’ The United States Constellation Program, which began in 2004 by the second Bush administration, was composed of an Ares 1 launch vehicle to send a crew of four astronauts to low Earth orbit in an Orion capsule (11). Once in orbit, the Orion capsule would rendezvous with the transfer orbit injection stage and lunar lander launched by the much larger Ares V launch vehicle. If one reads Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, one would notice a very interesting fact. In his Space Odyssey story, as Dr. Heywood Floyd was approaching Space Station One, he notices other spacecraft in the area. There was the Titov-V, which is an acknowledgment to Gherman Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth, but there were two other vehicles in the story. The two craft were named the Ares-1B lunar carrier and the Orion III (12). Do you really believe the names of the vehicles in the Constellation Program, and the names of the craft in 2001: A Space Odyssey, was just a coincidence? Making something “real” by using the fictional names and applying it to real hardware or program is not as uncommon as one might think. In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 story called Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke writes about an early warning system to protect the Earth from future impacts by large cosmological objects (e.g., asteroids and comets) (13). In Clarke’s story, on September 11, 2077, a meteor exploded in the sky above northern Italy. Six-hundred-thousand individuals died in this fictional event. The inhabitants of Earth decided never to be surprised again by such a colossal impact so they built an early warning system called Project SPACEGUARD. A comet impact with the Earth would produce large-scale devastation. As an example of the extent of the destruction, in 1994 the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was torn into 23 pieces by Jupiter’s intense gravitational field when it came too close to the planet. The fragments were labeled A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H,…all the way to W, and all impacted the planet (Figure 9). The largest of these fragments was the 308 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


G-fragment, about a mile across, and when the G-fragment collided with Jupiter, the collision released 6 million megatons of TNT (14). That amount of energy would be equal to the total energy released from one small atomic bomb dropped every second…for eleven years! Obviously, one small “cosmic event” can ruin your whole day. An informal joke at JPL is, “the reason why the dinosaurs are not alive today is because they didn’t have a space program.”

Figure 9. An image of Jupiter after the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into its atmosphere. The brown spots are the scars left behind from this July 1994 event. Courtesy NASA/Hubble Space Telescope.

Fast-forward 17 years. The US House of Representatives included the following text in their 1990 Authorization Act for NASA: The Committee believes that it is imperative that the detection rate of Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids must be increased substantially, and that the means to destroy or alter the orbits of asteroids when they threaten collision should be defined and agreed upon internationally (15). The committee directed NASA to begin this process with two workshops. The first would be used to design a program that would dramatically increase the detection rate of Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids. The second would define systems for altering the trajectory of or destroying those asteroids that pose a danger to life on Earth. The name of this NASA program to increase the detection rate of asteroids is called SPACEGUARD (15). 309 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.


There are many examples of the intimate relationship between science fiction and future scientific endeavors. In the late 1970s when the Space Shuttle was becoming a reality, a name was needed for the first shuttle. It was only an engineering model and would never actually be launched into space. This craft was needed to perform flight tests in Earth’s atmosphere. The name chosen for this shuttle was Enterprise. The US Navy has had 9 ships previously named Enterprise (16). One belonged to the US Continental Navy in 1776, another was a Yorktown-class aircraft carrier that was the most decorated vessel in the US Navy and one was the first US nuclear powered aircraft carrier. The question is, was this shuttle named after one of these very famous Naval ships or was it named after James T. Kirk’s famous starship (Figure 10)?

Figure 10. A photograph of the original production model of the USS Enterprise at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. This “Constitution-class” Enterprise starship “boldly went were no man had gone before.”. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

All of these examples have a common theme: imagination becoming reality. Imagination is needed for entertainment and it’s needed for increasing our understanding of the Universe. Hollywood is in the business of entertainment through imagination. They manufacture dreams. These dreams can be comedies, horrors, mysteries, or dramas. Any one of these themes can use space as a backdrop. Those “space movies” we call science fiction and can give us brief glimpses of tomorrow. The closer these stories are to a believable future (or a future we want), the more we celebrate them with dolls, models and posters. At NASA we dream of sending robots to other worlds, finding life on other surfaces and one day, visiting them ourselves. Walking the halls of our laboratory for deep space robotic exploration, one comes into contact with those dreams as they become reality. …the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow -- Dr. Robert H. Goddard 310 In Hollywood Chemistry; Nelson, D., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.

Acknowledgments This work was done as a private venture and not in the author’s capacity as an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.


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Wright, M. Article on Von Braun and Walt Disney: The Disney−Von Braun Collaboration and Its Influence on Space Exploration, 1993. http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/disney_article.html. Biographies of U.S. Astronauts. http://www.spacefacts.de/bios/astronauts/ english/tito_dennis.htm. Virgin Galactic. http://www.virgingalactic.com/. International Space Station. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ International_Space_Station. Project Orion (nuclear propulsion). Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion). Star Wars. http://www.starwars.com/explore/encyclopedia/technology/tie/ Deep Space 1. http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/ds1/. Hayabusa. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/ enterp/missions/hayabusa/index.shtml. Dawn. NASA. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/main/index.html. Verne, J. De la Terra a la Lune; Pierre-Jules Hetzel: Strasbourg, France, 1865. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/main/index2.html Clarke, A. C. 2001: A Space Odyssey; New American Library: New York, 1968. Clarke, A. C. Rendezvous with Rama; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: Orlando, FL, 1973. One Universe. http://www.nap.edu/jhp/oneuniverse/linked_motion_5455.html. Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards. http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/downloads/ spacesurvey.pdf. USS Enterprise. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise.


How Hollywood Inspires the Exploration of Space - ACS Publications

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