Watching Neil Armstrong take his first small step onto the moon in 1969, one man had more reason than most to be excited. In Belgium, Hergé, creator of Tintin and his cartoon companions, was spellbound. To him, it seemed that Armstrong and his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin were re-enacting scenes from comic strips he had drawn 20 years earlier.
Hergé had sent Tintin on his way to the moon in 1950. His lunar explorers, kitted out in heavy suits and helmets, strode with giant steps over a desolate landscape. Watching Armstrong and Aldrin was like watching those cartoons come to life. The similarities between Tintin’s moon mission and NASA’s were uncanny – and all the more remarkable because when Tintin went to the moon, the space race had not even started and space travel was still in the realm of fantasy.
WHEN Neil Armstrong returned from the moon, he was showered with congratulatory messages. One, from Belgium, stood out from the rest. It was a drawing showing the American astronaut emerging from the lunar module ready to take that first small step onto the moon. But there, in bright orange space suits waiting to greet him, was some sort of reception committee. A bald-pated man with spectacles was holding out a bunch of roses. A rough-looking fellow with a big black beard held a placard saying Welcome. And striding forward was a young fellow with a blonde quiff accompanied by a small white dog. “Welcome to the moon, Mr Armstrong,” he said.
Advertisement
Tintin fans would have understood immediately. Years earlier, Hergé’s intrepid young reporter had climbed out of his own rocket and stepped onto the surface of the moon. “For the first time in the history of mankind there is an explorer on the moon!” he had declared. Readers who watched Armstrong clamber out of the lunar module must have had a powerful sense of déjà vu. For when Hergé, the great Belgian cartoonist, launched his hero Tintin into space, he drew what could have been the blueprint for much of the Apollo mission.
But while Tintin had been a phenomenon in Europe since 1929, he was virtually unknown in the US. “Neil Armstrong hadn’t got the foggiest idea what the picture was all about,” says Michael Farr, the UK’s leading Tintinologist. “When he did see the books, I think he was surprised, especially when he realised how early the story had been written.”
Tintin’s moon adventure began as a comic strip in 1950 – nine years before the first spacecraft reached the moon, 11 years before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and 19 years before the Apollo 11 mission. It was published in two books, Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, in 1953 and 1954.
For all Tintin’s adventures, Hergé drew on events of the day, whether political or scientific – an element of realism that helped to make his stories so successful. He did his homework thoroughly, finding out about the latest scientific theories and emerging technologies. “He never let his imagination run away with him,” says Farr. But when he decided to send Tintin to the moon, there was a problem. No one had been there; the technology to take men to the moon did not exist. The sort of facts Hergé needed to make his story credible were hard to come by. “It was a very esoteric subject at that time, not something written about much. Even in science magazines there was precious little because the idea was pie in the sky,” says Farr.
Undeterred, Hergé collected every scrap of information he could find about the moon and what it would take to get there. He consulted two of Europe’s most renowned astronautics experts, the Belgian Bernard Heuvelmans and the Frenchman Alexandre Ananoff. He even built a model of his spacecraft and took it to Paris for Ananoff’s approval.
In Tintin’s moon adventure, the eccentric boffin Professor Calculus builds a nuclear-powered rocket that carries Tintin and his friends to the moon and back. Arriving on the moon, the gang discovers a desolate place – in Tintin’s words “a nightmare land, a place of death, horrifying in its desolation…not a tree, not a flower, not a blade of grass”. As they walk on the moon, every step is a giant leap. Exploring further afield in a lunar rover that resembles a wartime tank, they discover a scarred and cratered land and icy caverns.
In 1950, there were photos of the moon taken through telescopes, but it was nine years before the Soviet Luna probe orbited the moon and took a closer look. There was still a chance that the moon was peopled by aliens or at least vegetated with weird plants and plenty of people believed it. “Hergé never subscribed to the green cheese notion,” says Farr. And when the Americans landed in 1969, Armstrong confirmed his vision. His words echoed Tintin’s. The scene, he told Houston, was one of “magnificent desolation”.
The sight of NASA’s astronauts leaping about in their cumbersome spacesuits was also straight out of the comic strip. A quick leaf through an astronomy textbook would have told Hergé that the moon’s gravity was only a sixth of that on Earth. But how heavy was a spacesuit? Hergé modelled his on a prototype designed by Ananoff, but even burdened by a bulky suit, oxygen cylinder and radio, Tintin and co bounced over the surface…like Armstrong and Aldrin.
Hergé got so much right, so why not the rocket? Today, Professor Calculus’s plutonium-powered vehicle seems more advanced than NASA’s. But in the late 1940s, it looked as though nuclear power would be the future. Even the world’s greatest rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, was thinking nuclear. Von Braun had designed Germany’s wartime V2 rocket and was now working on new designs in the US. But even a scaled-up V2 would never have been able to carry enough fuel to reach the moon.
Hergé’s moon rocket was the spitting image of the V2 – the only model he had to go on – but with a nuclear motor. Nuclear power would not only get the rocket to the moon and back, it also solved the problem of weightlessness. With no limits on fuel, the ship could accelerate all the way there, so maintaining near-normal gravity inside. Experiments in free-falling planes had given scientists a good idea of what weightlessness would be like, and Hergé was familiar with the concept. For one brief moment, his nuclear motor is accidentally shut down, leaving Tintin and his friends floating about just like today’s astronauts. And while Captain Haddock could normally rely on his whisky to sit safely in the bottom of his glass, for a few frustrating seconds it bobbed before him, a golden sphere just out of reach.
In the event, the space race began before nuclear technology was ready. NASA had to get into space fast, and while a single-stage rocket like the V2 could not reach the moon, a multi-stage rocket powered by more potent fuels could. The downside was that Armstrong and his fellow travellers were condemned to weightlessness for the duration.
Hergé got one other thing badly wrong – or so he believed. During their exploration of the moon, Tintin and Captain Haddock find a cavern filled with stalactites and stalagmites. “This proves that at some period there was water on the moon,” says Tintin. Deeper inside, first Snowy the dog, then Tintin, disappear down a slippery slope of ice. At the time, the existence of water on the moon was hotly debated. Heuvelmans thought subterranean ice was a distinct possibility. Hergé took some persuading, but eventually went along with him.
When Armstrong and Aldrin reached the moon, however, it looked utterly parched. Rocks and dust brought back from later missions contained no trace of water. But some scientists still harboured thoughts of ice. Clearly, water had never flowed on the moon, but over billions of years the moon had been bombarded with meteorites and comets which could have left icy debris behind. Most of that ice would have evaporated, but some might remain in deep craters where the sun never shone.
Hergé died in 1983, still thinking he had got it wrong. In 1994, NASA’s Clementine probe picked up signs of ice in the giant South Pole-Aitken crater. In 1998, another probe, Lunar Prospector, found evidence of ice at both poles. Then, last year, observations from the radio dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico suggested that the probes had been deceived by signals bouncing off the walls of craters. The matter remains unresolved.
It might finally be settled when the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 probe reaches the moon in February 2005, and begins searching for water in the depths of the deepest, darkest craters. SMART-1 has been billed as the first European spacecraft to travel to the moon. Tintin fans know better.