I am always eager to see a science fiction show with reasonably accurate science in it-- having consumed entirely too much of the other kind. And I am always rooting for filmmakers who are willing to respect science and technology, even when the result is less than successful. The number of TV series that have attempted plausible portrayals of near-future spaceflight is quite small. In 1990 or so, I was hoping
Lee David Zlotoff would add one to the list.
James Nicoll has begun watching, and commenting upon,
Plymouth, a 1991 movie that has long intrigued me. (
Installment 1 of James's comments.) (
2.) (
3.) (
4.) An industrial accident having rendered the town of Plymouth, Oregon uninhabitable, the residents accept an offer to move
en masse to a new lunar colony.
This film was Zlotoff’s pilot for a planned TV series, but it did not sell, and the pilot movie was aired on the ABC network 24 May 1991. It has never been released on tape or DVD. But it has turned up on Youtube.
In the second installment of his Plymouthblogging,
James writes:
AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH
I mean, "I didn't realize enthusiasm about lunar helium 3 goes back to 1991. How interesting."
At this point I realized that it might be worth discussing the background of lunar-settlement ideas at the time
Plymouth was made. (Your headquarters for this kind of stuff is the
Lunar Bases & Settlement Library assembled by the National Space Society. It contains a remarkable number of books, papers, and conference proceedings.)
As you may know, University of Wisconsin researchers proposed 25 years ago that helium-3, combined with deuterium, would make a wonderful fuel for advanced fusion reactors. Because there is very little helium-3 on Earth, it would have to be obtained elsewhere. The idea was to recover helium-3 particles pounded into the lunar soil by the solar wind. This requires mining operations on a massive scale. One would have to strip-mine and bake acres of regolith to get a few grams of the precious isotope.
James does not think this is a good idea.*
The rise of helium-3 dovetailed with a revival of interest in a Moon base, as expressed in the proceedings of a 1984 conference,
Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century (866 pages)
(HTML) (page offering a big PDF of the entire book as well as PDFs of individual papers).
The cover painting by Pat Rawlings shows a spacesuited adult and a spacesuited child watching a lunar mass-driver ship payloads of oxygen to industrial operations somewhere in near-Earth space. They're sitting beside a sign proclaiming "Future Site of the Apollo Museum." The Earth hangs just above the horizon (we must be at a high northern latitude, because Asia is above Australia.)
Two years after this conference, a year after the book came out, L.J. Wittenberg, J.F. Santarius and G.L. Kulcinski, who had been thinking for a while about fusion reactors that would burn something other than deuterium-tritium, published their seminal paper,
Lunar Source of He-3 for Commercial Fusion Power.
I welcomed this novel idea, and took it as a sign that as more people from different disciplines got involved in thinking about lunar settlement and other extraterrestrial endeavors, clever new ideas would appear.
In 1988, I attended another conference in Houston, which you can read about in
The Second Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, again edited by Wendell W. Mendell. Here's the "
complete online copy" consisting of an HTML page with links to a PDF of each chapter.
In particular, the Wisconsin fusion guys attended this conference and presented their shiny new helium-3 idea:
Fusion Energy from the Moon for the Twenty-first Century. At this point they already had Harrison H. Schmitt-- moonwalker, geologist, and former Senator-- on board as a coauthor; today he remains the most prominent figure advocating helium-3 mining.
John Santarius also contributed a solo paper on how helium-3 fusion might be useful for propulsion,
Lunar 3He, Fusion Propulsion, and Space Development. And T.M. Crabb and M. K. Jacobs jumped on the bandwagon with
Synergism of 3He Acquisition with Lunar Base Evolution.
Many space advocates embraced helium-3. Here was something the Moon has that the Earth might need; small masses could easily be shipped to Earth. Maybe this would provide the economic incentive for investment in space transportation, lunar bases, and spacefaring infrastructure.
As a hot new idea, helium mining would work its way into science fiction. It was ripe for the plucking when Lee David Zlotoff decided to make a TV show set on the Moon. Helium mining would be the chief export of his lunar settlement.
In 1990 I attended a space conference where Zlotoff made a presentation on his production. He had enlisted the aid of numerous moonbase experts (most of whom I had met by this point). He had hired Pat Rawlings as conceptual designer to draw spacecraft, lunar rovers, and mining vehicles. He even cast an Apollo astronaut, Pete Conrad, to play himself, an aging astronaut bossing the lunar construction crew. He could not have found more knowledgeable advisers.
Here are
some articles about the making of Plymouth.
I was hoping Zlotoff would succeed. Alas, the series was not picked up, and the pilot was aired as a TV movie, and rarely seen again.
I didn’t find it to be first-rate entertainment, and the transplanted-town premise was a bit hard to believe, but I really liked seeing a fairly realistic lunar colony on the screen. It had promise. I would have tuned in the series regularly-- but it was not to be.
If you want to see
Plymouth for yourself:
Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8Some of the comments on Youtube have been left by people who worked on the film.
As the years went on, helium-3's disadvantages seemed to loom larger (even as it was appearing in more science fiction stories and films), but it still has advocates. Here are the
lecture slides from a course on "Resources from Space" at the University of Wisconsin in 2004, taught by several familiar scholars.
*For a lot of good reasons,
which you can read here.
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