Orion Spaceplane by B.J. West
2001: A Space
Odyssey 3D Modelling Archive
Alien Egg and USS Sulaco Meshes by D. Proctor and they are available from his Movie Mesh Site
Robby the Robot Mesh Copyright James Murphy
Puzzlebox mesh by Mateen Greenway
Sometime in the 23rd Century... the survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind only lives for pleasure. freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything.
There's just one catch.
Life must end at thirty, unless reborn in the fiery ritual of carousel.
Sandman Pistol mesh by Mateen Greenway
Icarus mesh by Mateen Greenway
Interociter mesh by Mateen Greenway
In 1929 Fritz Lang (director of Metropolis) released a silent film about space travel, Frau im Mond or Woman in the Moon. Lang had great ambitions for the project, and as technical advisor he engaged Germany’s leading rocketry expert, Hermann Oberth.
The plot of Woman in the Moon follows a group of six people who undertake a hazardous journey to the Moon to search for gold deposits believed to exist there. Their rocket, named Friede after the only woman in the crew, is launched with great public fanfare (including a launch countdown, used for the first time in this movie). Upon reaching the Moon, they discover not only gold, but a breathable atmosphere (one of the movie’s few scientific errors). Conflict develops among the crew; two are killed and part of the ship’s oxygen supply is lost. In the film’s climax the crew must decide who among them will return to Earth.
Woman in the Moon was the first serious depiction of space flight in film, and was unequalled in its realism until the movie Destination Moon of 1950. The rocket Oberth designed for the film was based on his own theoretical model for a lunar rocket, and many of its features — fin stabilization, liquid-fuelled engines and multiple stages — looked forward to later spacecraft designs. It was so accurate, in fact, that when the German military began its own rocket program the scale model, diagrams and prints of the film were regarded as state secrets and confiscated by the police.
In addition to his technical advice, Hermann Oberth was asked to build a real rocket to be launched as a publicity stunt at the premiere of the movie. Though this stunt rocket was not completed in time for the opening, work was continued by Oberth and other rocket enthusiasts (including a teenager named Wernher von Braun). Oberth and Von Braun contributed to many of the advances in German rocketry during the 1930s and ’40s and both later worked for the American government. They, along with Fritz Lang, lived to see their vision made real with the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969, forty years after the release of Woman in the Moon.
