Explorers on the Moon
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| Tintin: Explorers on the Moon (On a marché sur la Lune) |
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Explorers on the Moon (On a marché sur la Lune), published in 1954 is the seventeenth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero. It is the second of a two-part adventure begun in Destination Moon.
[edit] The storyline
The story continues from Destination Moon. Calculus is taking Tintin, Tintin's dog Snowy, Haddock and his assistant Frank Wolff to the moon in his rocket.
At least he thinks that's all: but soon the Thompson twins come up from the hold. They had got the time of the launch wrong. Calculus is concerned at the effect this will have on their air supplies; Haddock is furious, and lambasts the Thompson twins for being too imbecilic to understand the difference between 1:34 a.m. and 1:34 p.m.
The journey to the Moon is not uneventful--Haddock has smuggled some whisky in hollowed-out books, becomes drunk, and engages in some unscheduled extravehicular activity that results in him briefly becoming a moon of the asteroid Adonis. Tintin must also don a space suit to fetch him, and, in a very rare display of temper, lashes out at the Captain, declaring that the latter's recklessness has "nearly cost us our lives." When the rocket must temporarily halt in order to execute the turnaround maneuver that will enable it to land on the moon right side up, the momentary lack of natural gravity also poses problems for Haddock, who neglects to put on his magnetic-soled boots in time.
Additionally, the Thompson twins suffer one of their periodic relapses of the condition caused by their ingestion of the energy-multiplying substance Formula Fourteen (see Land of Black Gold). As a result, they sprout thick hair that grows at lightning speed and frequently changes color. The Captain, having no other immediate duty, volunteers to cut their hair, but can scarcely keep up with it, and begins to suffer blisters from the scissors. He remarks sarcastically that in future, when people ask him what he did on the rocket, he will reply, "Me? I was the hairdresser." Gradually, however, the twins' condition abates, and their appearances begin to return to normal.
The spacecraft lands safely in Hipparchus (lunar crater), and by agreement of the crew, Tintin is the first to set foot on the Moon - the first human to do so. Everyone then gets a chance to walk about; even the Captain enjoys it, but upon seeing the Earth, expresses fear about whether they will survive ever to see it again. Later, the Captain, Wolff and Tintin take the battery-powered tank to explore some stalactite caves; Snowy falls on an ice sheet, damaging his two-way radio and there is a minor drama in rescuing him, but they return to the rocket safely. Tintin decides to rest up and have lunch with Wolff while the Captain, the twins and Calculus go out in the tank again.
Now danger is looming. A secret agent from a foreign power, the brutish Colonel Jorgen, whom Tintin had previously encountered and bested in the adventure of King Ottokar's Sceptre, has been hiding in the rocket. It turns out that Wolff has gambling debts, and has been forced to aid Jorgen and his backers involuntarily. Tintin goes below to fetch some supplies for lunch, and Jorgen overpowers him and tries to take over the rocket, leaving our heroes marooned on the Moon, and fly it back to his own country. Outside, from the tank, the Captain, the Thompsons and Calculus watch, horrified, as the rocket blasts off, shuts down, and, for one horrible moment, appears to be on the verge of capsizing before coming to rest right-side up. Tintin has freed himself and succeeded in defeating the plot, but in order to do so has been forced to sabotage the rocket to prevent Jorgen's attempted liftoff. After the group interrogates Jorgen, Tintin eventually locks the spy in the hold, against protests by the Captain that they won't have enough oxygen to last the way home unless they leave him on the Moon or kill him.
Due to the strain on the oxygen supplies, the crew decides to abandon some of the equipment, rather than disassembling it and packing it up, and to cut short the lunar stay. Even so, shortly before take-off, the Captain becomes the first among them to experience a bout of dizziness due to build-up of carbon dioxide. The lift-off is successful, despite concerns about repairs necessitated by Tintin's sabotaging of Jorgen's illicit take-off attempt. But the rocket is off-course, and by the time the crew awake from the liftoff-induced blackout and correct it, they have lost additional time and consumed yet more oxygen.
Halfway back to Earth, Jorgen escapes after overpowering the Thompsons, who had gotten the idea into their heads that handcuffs would be more secure than the Captain's knots. When Wolff sees that Jorgen intends to shoot Tintin and the others, a struggle ensues, and the gun goes off accidentally; Jorgen is shot right through the heart and dies instantly. The crew have no choice but to consign the body to space. However, even without Jorgen, now there isn't enough oxygen to make it home. Later, they wake up to find that Wolff has committed suicide by leaving the ship, leaving a moving goodbye note explaining that he felt responsibility for their predicament and wanted to save everyone else's lives.
The rest of the group continues towards the Earth, as their oxygen runs low. Everyone is falling unconscious. Tintin faints but mission control sounds a siren which awakens him to be able to get the ship set up to land. After the ship lands, firemen break the door open, finding everyone unconscious. On the tarmac, a doctor is giving a prostrate Haddock oxygen, but fears that the Captain's heart is worn out because "It seems he was a great whisky drinker." Suddenly roused by the sound of the word "whisky", Captain Haddock wakes up with a start. Everyone rejoices and a ground crew member returns with a bottle of whisky. Calculus gives a toast which includes his hopes for a return to the moon. The Captain gets furious and promptly walks away resulting with a trip and a fall over a stretcher in the midst of declaring that "Man's proper place ... is on dear old Earth." And with that the book ends.
[edit] Scientific accuracy
Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon were written well over a decade before the 1969 moon landings and several years before manned space flight. Hergé was keen to ensure that the books were scientifically accurate, based on ideas about space flight then available.
The rockets bear a striking physical resemblance to V-2 rockets, down to the checkerboard pattern on the hull which the V-2 designers used to measure the rolling of a rocket during test flights. No separate lunar lander is shown: the whole ship turns about on its axis, lands 'feet down', and returns intact, in stark contrast to the real-life moon craft, which are multi-stage and leave most of the rocket behind.
The rocket has two propulsion systems: a conventional liquid-fueled rocket for launching (and also for deceleration upon landing), and an engine for the spacebound part of the journey, described as being nuclear-powered (cf. Project Orion). The depicted rationale for this solution is to avoid contaminating takeoff and landing sites with radioactive exhaust products. Today, nuclear power is not widespread in space propulsion because of another safety risk, namely that of the reactor core or other radioactive materials falling back to Earth upon accidental or programmed destruction of the spacecraft. Also, nuclear power is being used only for space probe propulsion as the thrust generated by such a motor is insufficient to lift a heavy spacecraft off a planet.
The books shows gravity being generated through the constant acceleration of the moon rocket. This is unrealistic for two reasons. First, even the most powerful rockets conceived of by science cannot produce sufficient sustained thrust. Second, if the spaceship truly was accelerating at such a rate, the flight time to the moon would be a matter of hours, not days as depicted in the English version of the book. (In the French version, however, flight director Baxter calls the landing site shortly after the rocket has taken off from the Moon to inform them that it will arrive 'in four hours.')
When the rocket is turned around halfway through the journey (to decelerate), the crew experiences weightlessness for a short time, and the effects of this weightlessness are correctly portrayed, including floating liquid held into a spherical shape by surface tension.
The space-suits are rigid and have glass fishbowl-like helmets, with bulky backpacks integrated that permit radio communications with the ship and other astronauts. The main differences from the suits worn by the Apollo astronauts are that they are apparently rigid, rather than soft, are orange rather than white, and the helmets lack sun-shielding tints.
Hergé accurately represented the methods of movement on the Moon: Tintin and friends hop in huge jumps. They also have a lunar rover vehicle although it is far larger and heavier than the Apollo equivalent.
Notable failings include the representation of the Earth as seen from space (there are no clouds), and the lunar landscape, which is represented as craggy, unlike the smooth, undulating hills of reality. The asteroid Adonis is a real object, but despite being classed as a near-Earth asteroid, its orbit does not bring it between the Earth and the Moon.
Hergé was delighted to have predicted the lunar mission fairly accurately, given the limited knowledge at the time, and later he produced a cartoon of Tintin greeting Neil Armstrong on the Moon.
| The Adventures of Tintin | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creation of Tintin · Books, films, and media · Ideology of Tintin | ||||
| Characters: | Supporting · Minor · Complete list | |||
| Miscellany: | Hergé · Marlinspike · Captain Haddock's exclamations | |||
