Way Stations In Space (1961)

★★★★★ · Mars Needs Women · Wilford B. Wolf · 2005-07-28

Incredible film aimed at 4th-6th graders that covers the possiblities of space stations. The space race was in high gear in 1961, and so was likely a hot topic of discussion in the schools. The film starts off with a curious hold over from the 1950s science films; two young children ask (via an all knowing narrator) their uncle, a rocket scientist, about rockets. This leads into a discussion on how rockets work and why they need to be in stages, first using the example of an X-15 rocket plane carried by a B-52. From there, the design and building of a space station are discussed, primarily in…

★★★★ · Way Stations in Space · Marshall Eubanks · 2007-05-13

Pretty cool movie, but the physics is very bad. It is obvious that no real scientist reviewed the script. The two worse errors : rocket planes (they showed an X-15) were carried up in a plane to escape (much of) the drag of the Earth's atmosphere, not the Earth's gravity and the gravitational acceleration of a space station is still directed towards the center of the Earth, etc. - the direction is not changed by motion. But the engineering is pretty correct for 1961. This movie pretty much shows how NASA planned to get to the Moon before Kennedy announced the goal of doing it during the…

★★★★ · What are you doing¡¦ Daaaaave¡¦ · Spuzz · 2006-01-26

Space Waystations is great! It¡¯s totally the type of space race film you would see in the late 50¡¯s / early 60¡¯s to teach people what to expect in space in the next decade or so. We start out with the space station, which looks remarkably like Kubrick¡¯s version in 2001. The film goes on and on about how man can build this and it¡¯s upkeep and all that. Of course, nothing like that has remotely come close to that vision. Oh sure, we have space stations in space, but nothing like that white collussus. Then the film talks about going to the moon, and quite accurately explains how man could…

★★ · Somewhat behind its own times. · joeyneutrino · 2010-04-03

Among the other interesting mistakes, it's curious that the problem of re-entry is described as an unsolved problem. This film is dated 1961, yet by that time the broad design of the Mercury spacecraft was already a done-deal, with suborbital and orbital flights under its belt that very same year. On top of all that, Yuri Gagarin made his one orbit flight with re-entry that year. Even more embarrassing is that the German V-2 rockets had been surviving suborbital re-entry way back in the second world war. Heat transfer was a practical engineering problem and getting a ship down from orbit…