Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most depressing obstacle to voyaging to the moon is how to raise money (about $10 billion) to pay for fleets of gigantic rockets and floods of expensive fuel. Other problems, if less immediate, are more entertaining. In the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Astronomer H. Percy Wilkins, Ph.D., F.R.A.S., tries to figure out where to land on the moon...
...every space fan knows, the spaceship will approach the moon tail first, its rocket motors blasting hard enough to cancel the speed of falling through the moon's gravitational field. As it nears the surface, it will extend three spring-cushioned legs on which (if all goes well) it will come to rest in a vertical position, undamaged and ready for the earthbound blastoff. This delicate maneuver requires a level landing site; if the spaceship were to hit the lunar equivalent of the Grand Canyon, it would have small chance of seeing the earth again...
...moon, says Dr. Wilkins, has plenty of level plains (misnamed "seas"), but to land on one of them would be like landing in the middle of the Sahara Desert. There would be nothing of interest nearby for the voyagers to explore. The moon's interesting parts are its mountainous areas, and they are mostly so rough that no spaceship could land on them without a disastrous crash. Dr. Wilkins thinks that the best bet would be to land inside one of the moon's great craters. Some of them are rough inside, but others look fairly smooth...
...selected for one of our shows." The girl turned dejectedly away and was joined by her tense-lipped mother, who slipped a coat over the girl's shoulders and spoke to her in a fierce whisper as they went out the door. The next aspirant, a moon-faced young man, was already at the girl's place before the studio mike. He burst thunderously into the Largo al Factotum ("Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!") from The Barber of Seville...
From here on, the picture keeps blurring from dream to reality and back again, like the moon in a mist. In his first dream, which takes place around the turn of the century, the composer meets an old man who tells him all about the good old days, back in 1830. In a flash the musician becomes a bugler, off to sound the charge on some sultan's daughter (Gina Lollobrigida) in Algeria. But after lolling awhile with Lollobrigida, he meets the old man again, and is off to 1790 for some wig-nuzzling with a willing aristocrat (Magali...