Childhood Inspiration
Salvage 1 is a 1979 made for TV movie. It served as a pilot for a TV series. I know I watched the series, but I don’t remember it. However I do remember the movie. It is the inspirational story of a junk man who uses surplus parts to assemble a rocket and fly to the moon.
The Salvage 1 team had two main things working for them:
- Firstly they had a brilliant new fuel that was so powerful it could fly a small rocket to the moon (think of the rocket ship from the 1930’s Flash Gorden serials) so they wouldn’t have to build a huge Saturn 5 or space shuttle.
- And secondly they were prepared to take more risks, rather having backups to backups with more backups added for safety like NASA, they designed a simpler and cheaper system.
At the time I thought it was great fun, but we didn’t need to build our own rockets out of scrap/surplus because the Space Shuttle was just around the corner and was going to give us regularly scheduled flights into orbit ever two weeks, or maybe even more frequently!
Around the same time I saw a documentary on TV about a guy who had a similar plan. He was going to fly himself into space using surplus rocket parts. I didn’t remember his name or know what became of him. Obviously he didn’t succeed in building his rocket - but the Space Shuttle is not going to fly me to the Moon so maybe I will have to search for some rocket scientists to build me my own rocket.
In the meantime here is a YouTube video of some Salvage 1 clips set to “Space Cowboy” by NSYNC.
Don’t you just love those cheap 1970’s TV special effects 