This week, with the Artemis II mission returning from the far side of the moon and space back in the headlines, I found myself reaching for an old Brooke Bond tea card album. It’s called The Race Into Space, it was published in 1971, and it features a foreword from a very young-looking Patrick Moore full of absolute certainty that some of the children collecting those cards would one day walk on the moon. It’s a wonderful little document, and also a rather poignant one.
I was born in 1967, so I don’t remember the original moon landings, but I do remember the Apollo programme and the last moon landing in December 1972. I remember walking home from school in the darkness, looking up at the moon, and trying to imagine that there were brave astronauts actually up there as I was looking. Space felt like the beginning of something enormous. The moon was just the first step. Mars was next. The tea cards said so.
Over fifty years later, we are still waiting. The space shuttle came and went. We have a permanent space station in orbit, which is remarkable, but it isn’t quite the giant moonbase the tea cards promised. Card number 50 in the album, the final one, describes a manned mission to Mars in extraordinary detail, right down to the arrival date of 9th August 1982 and the return to Earth on 14th August 1983. It sounded like a long time away in 1971. It feels even further away now.
But back in the 1970s, none of us could imagine that the space age would stall, and space was absolutely everywhere in popular culture, not least on television. One of my earliest and most charming memories is of the Clangers, those tiny knitted creatures on their little pink planet, communicating by whistling in a way that somehow made perfect sense. Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin caught something real with that show, a gentleness and warmth about the idea of life beyond Earth that felt entirely different from the darker science fiction of the period.
Before the Clangers, Gerry and Sylvia Anderson had already staked their claim to the space race with Fireball XL5, first broadcast in 1962 but repeated well into the 1970s. Captain Steve Zodiac of the World Space Patrol flew around the galaxy in the year 2062, which honestly doesn’t feel as far away as it once did. It was clean, wholesome fun, and it was the Andersons’ most successful show on American television, the only one to air on a major US network.
But the show that truly captured the spirit of the space race for me was Star Trek. It was one of the first programmes I can remember watching, and the very first episode I saw scared me rigid. Bald telepathic aliens whose heads moved when they sent their subconscious messages. I was about four or five years old and I had nightmares. I later found out they were called the Talosians. Knowing their name didn’t make them any less terrifying.
What I loved about Star Trek, once I was old enough not to be frightened by it, was the sheer scope of the adventures and the gadgets. The communicators, the flashing lights on the bridge, and above all the doors that opened with a swishing noise. William Shatner was perfect as Captain Kirk, balanced brilliantly against Leonard Nimoy’s cool, logical Mr Spock and DeForest Kelley’s direct and gruff Dr McCoy. NASA named its first prototype space shuttle Enterprise. Motorola based their flip phone on the Star Trek communicator. Life does imitate art sometimes.
As the decade wore on, the mood shifted. The film Capricorn One suggested the moon landings had been faked. Space 1999 gave us Moonbase Alpha, which was progress of a sort, but then the moon was blasted into outer space by a nuclear accident, and Commander Koenig spent most of his time watching his crew meet a grizzly end. The optimism of the early 1970s was gone.
But watching the Artemis II coverage this week, I felt some of that old excitement again. Brooke Bond thought we’d be on Mars by 1982. I’m not holding my breath, but if we get there while I’m still around, I’ll be happy.
Do you have memories of space on television during your 70s childhood? I’d love to hear from you, so leave a comment below or join the conversation in our Facebook group.
Take care,
Oliver
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