Moonliner

Disneyana

TWA MOONLINER

I’ve been fascinated by space and space travel since my childhood when I listened to Buck Rogers on the radio and watched Flash Gordon and Tom Corbett Space Cadet on our 10” black and white TV. I saved newspaper clippings of NASA rocket launches and searched the night sky for a glimpse of Sputnik. My first closeup views of the moon were with a handheld thirty power telescope that I received for Christmas one year, and I always looked forward to family  trips to see the planetarium show at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. Later I was able to get a close-up view of the moon’s crater marked surface through the Lick Observatory’s thirty six inch refracting  telescope with my High School Science Club.

Jules Vern wrote of space travel in his 1865 science fiction novel From Earth to Moon inspiring H.G. Well’s to pen The First Men in the Moon in 1901. A year later pioneer film maker George Melies created the classic A Trip to the Moon, and in 1903 visitor’s to New York’s Coney Island traveled to the lunar surface on Luna Park’s A Trip to the Moon dark ride attraction. Five decades later in 1955 Disneyland guests could ride the simulated Rocket to the Moon attraction aboard Howard Hughes TWA Moonliner designed by Imagineer John Hench and German Rocket Scientist  Werner von Braun. The iconic symbol of Tomorrowland towering above all other structures in the park guided guests to the show and the realistic experience of traveling from earth, around the backside of the moon, and return. Travelers watched the progress of the flight on upper and lower screens while sinking into their seats and feeling the rumble of the Moonliner’s vibrations. Once in space and nearing the moon the sensation of weightlessness took over with a gentle push of the seats. The dark backside of the moon was lit by flares and life in a permanent colony was described by a space suited resident scientist. Except for a brief run in with a threatening meteor shower, the return to earth was uneventful and in less than fifteen minutes passengers were back to the Happiest Place on Earth”.

Travel to the moon has been in the news in during the past year with India’s first unmanned landing on the lunar surface and Russia’s unsuccessful moon mission. Richard Branson began offering space tourism, first written about in the mid 1800’s, by providing flights into the upper atmosphere to paying customers aboard his companies Virgin Atlantic Rocket Plane, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX company is currently taking reservations for a trip around the moon in his Starship for the tidy fee of fifty million dollars. My trip to to the moon aboard the TWA Moonliner in 1955 cost $0.50       -Bill 10/23

Vintage 1950’s Postcard from my Disneyana Collection.