“Jettison Control, The Vulture Has Landed”

No, the Vulture wasn’t the backup lunar craft to the one flown by Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on 1969.  It’s the spacecraft made out of salvaged junk parts from the 1979 TV movie and subsequent TV series ‘Salvage-1′. 

Salvage-1 starred Andy Griffith as the perfectly cast and perfectly charming dreamer and junkman Harry Broderick, a man with a dream to build his own spacecraft and retrieve all the ‘junk’ left behind on the moon surface from the Apollo moon missions. 

You see, Harry proclaims that all that junk would be worth a fortune back here on Earth… and he’s going to do whatever it takes to get that junk.

The TV movie that kicked the whole adventure off has a surprising source of whimsy and semi-realism to it.  It succeeds if you believe that yes, you might NOT need to work at NASA to go exploring in space.   Hmmm, we’ve heard a similiar tone from private sector space explorers recently.

So, is Salvage-1 a visionary movie that bridges the gap between the olden days of Apollo and the present day efforts of space tourists?  Maybe, but only if you have a complete suspension of disbelief.

Half the charm of viewing Salvage-1 27 years after it first debuted is it’s use of what we consider to be out-of-date technologies measured by today’s standards.  Among them:

• Harry and the crew ‘hack’ into a large aerospace company’s master computer for their flight control navigation systems using a rotary phone
• When the two astronauts land on the lunar surface, they take a snapshot with what looks to be a Polaroid camera
• Astronaut Skip Carmichael attempts to fix the flow control of oxygen on the craft by using a wrench
• A cop light (ala Starsky and Hutch) is the primary alert system on the craft
• Mission control is run out of an RV

But does all of this really matter that much?  Nah, that’s half the charm of this series.  The writers pick up on the lack of interest in the space program in 1979, a computer technician hints “You’ve seen one moonshot, you’ve seen them all” once news hits the major broadcast networks that the Salvage-1 craft is on it’s way to the moon, previously unbeknownst to the general public.

Others must think so too.  Trolling around the net I found websites dedicated to Salvage-1 including ‘re-imaginging’ of the spacecraft with today’s graphics programs, a story of a never-completed Estes rocket of the Vulture, and a Yahoo group with over 600 members.

How long will it be until the un-inspiring Hollywood remake comes along?