Trivia / Journey into Space

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: Journey to the Moon / Operation Luna accurately predicted that the first spacewalk would take place in 1965. On March 18, 1965, the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to conduct a spacewalk when he exited the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission. This first spacewalk lasted for twelve minutes.
• Acting for Two: David Jacobs played 22 parts throughout the original series. More often in The Red Planet than in any other series, he can clearly be heard playing both sides of a conversation.
• Actor-Inspired Element: In Journey to the Moon / Operation Luna, Jet's great-uncle Hector, who tutored him about The Moon as a child, was based on Andrew Faulds' adopted uncle Hector MacPherson who wrote a book entitled Practical Astronomy.
• The Danza: Andrew "Jet" Morgan is played by Andrew Faulds.
• Missing Episode:
  • The recordings of the first season Journey to the Moon were wiped by the BBC.
  • The original recordings of The Red Planet, The World in Peril and Operation Luna were likewise wiped but complete copies were found in misfiled Transcription Service discs in 1986.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Mitch was the most frequently recast of the four main characters. He was played by Bruce Beeby for the first seven episodes of Journey to the Moon and Don Sharp for the remainder of the first season. In a double case of overlapping with The Original Darrin, Beeby returned for The Red Planet and Sharp returned for The World in Peril. David Williams assumed the role in Operation Luna. In the sequels produced decades after the original run, Mitch was played by Nigel Graham in The Return from Mars, Michael Beckley in Frozen in Time and Jot Davies in The Host.
  • Lemmy was played by David Kossoff in Journey to the Moon and The Red Planet, Alfie Bass in The World in Peril and Operation Luna, Anthony Hall in The Return from Mars, Chris Moran in Frozen in Time and Chris Pavlo in The Host.
  • Unlike Mitch and Lemmy, Jet was played by the same actor, namely Andrew Faulds, throughout the original series. In later decades, the role of Jet was assumed by John Pullen in The Return from Mars, David Jacobs in Frozen in Time and Toby Stephens in The Host.
  • At only three, Doc was played by the fewest actors of the four main characters: Guy Kingsley Poynter throughout the original run, Ed Bishop in The Return from Mars and Alan Marriott in Frozen in Time and The Host.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Bruce Beeby's wife Madi Hedd played Martha Bodie in The Red Planet.
  • David Kossoff's brother Alan Keith (whose birth name was Alec Kossoff) played a London correspondent in Operation Luna.
  • The writer Julian Simpson's wife Jana Carpenter played Edie Harper in The Host.
• Science Marches On:
  • In The Red Planet, a journalist asks Jet about the possibility of finding canals on Mars. Jet notes that this was a popular theory in the 19th Century but he is doubtful of their existence. Once they arrive on Mars, however, they find an ancient city built in the middle of a canal. Mitch suggests that it may be natural but Jet points out that its unnatural formation precludes that possibility. Lacus Solis, otherwise known as the Eye of Mars, is depicted as the Martian capital due to many canals intersecting in that area, as was suspected to be the case by Percival Lowell. In 1965, the NASA spacecraft Mariner 4 took the first close-up photographs of the Martian surface. These photos confirmed that the canals were nothing more than an optical illusion, as Joseph Edward Evans and Edward Maunder had speculated in 1903.
  • In The World in Peril, Doc notes that Jupiter has twelve moons. In 1955, this was believed to be the case but numerous others were discovered in subsequent years. With the discovery of twelve additional moons in 2018, there are now 79 known moons.
• Technology Marches On: In Journey to the Moon / Operation Luna, the Moon landing is broadcast to Earth over the radio on October 22, 1965. However, there is no mention of it being shown on television. When he wrote Journey to the Moon in 1953, Charles Chilton failed to anticipate how ubiquitous television would be by 1965. Since television was already very common in the UK by the time that Operation Luna was broadcast in 1958 (and its ubiquity is a plot point in The World in Peril), it was already dated even then. Similarly in The Red Planet, Jet's reports on the Mars landing are only broadcast over the radio.
• What Could Have Been:
  • After the success of The Quatermass Xperiment, the film remake of the 1953 BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment, Hammer expressed interest in producing a Journey into Space film. However, the studio did not think that the existing scripts were suitable for adaptation and instead requested that Charles Chilton write a new one. He was unable to do so due to his volume of work at the BBC.
  • Also in 1955, London Films and Ealing Studios separately considered producing a Journey into Space film.
  • In 1965, the BBC was considering a television version of Journey into Space to replace Doctor Who in several years. However, nothing came of it and Doctor Who ran until 1989.
• Write What You Know: Charles Chilton partly based the radio operator Lemmy, the crew's radio operator, on himself. He had been an RAF radio operator during World War II.