The invention of cinema, in 1895, came as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were leading speculation about the possibility of space travel. In 1902 Georges Méliès made an early masterpiece, Le Voyage dans la Lune ( A Trip to the Moon). Five astronomers are fired from a cannon and land in the Moon’s right eye. The interior is occupied by giant mushrooms. Not one for the boffins, but a playful tilt at the space craze, just as Barbarella was decades later.

Space was achingly close when Hollywood pulled out the special-effects stops for Forbidden Planet in 1956. Now a camp classic, it introduced crucial elements to the space movie genre – Robbie the Robot is a forerunner of C-3PO in Star Wars. And imagining space as hostile finds an echo in Alien, Solaris and later space movies.

With the televising of the Apollo missions in the 1960s, movies had to come up with something special to keep their edge. The Moon landings were only a year away when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey came out. meticulous design work managed to convey that reality.

But since man landed on the Moon rumours have persisted that the whole thing was cooked up in a TV studio. Such was the premise of Capricorn One (1978), in which a fake Mars mission led to murder.

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