Ben, Rob and Amber blast off with ‘Destination Moon’, the 1950 science fiction landmark that helped launch an entire decade of space age cinema. Directed by Irving Pichel, produced by George Pal and developed with legendary sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein, Destination Moon stars John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers and Dick Wesson as the crew of the first privately funded mission to the Moon. Released nearly twenty years before Apollo 11, the film treated space travel with a seriousness that helped reshape what science fiction could look like on screen.

Did Destination Moon really start the 1950s sci-fi boom, and how scientifically serious was its vision of travelling to the Moon? What did the film predict correctly, what did it get spectacularly wrong, and how did its ideas eventually cross paths with the real world of NASA? How were  ...