Gravity (2013)
A landlubber scientist given six months’ hurried training as an astronaut so she can rocket 375 miles above Earth and conduct an experiment into – what? So breakneck is the pacing of Alfonso Cuarón’s space thriller that it’s never explained quite why Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) needs to be in space for her work. Who cares? The job is quickly forgotten and for 90 excellent minutes Cuarón pits unhelpful physics against Stone: no gravity, no air, no fuel, lots of lethal debris. “I hate space,” she says. Well, space evidently loathes her
Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Deep Impact (1998)
Earth, typically, is under threat in Mimi Leder’s summer blockbuster – on this occasion, an asteroid the size of San Francisco is hurtling towards us. As the superbly named Spurgeon Tanner, bald and barrel chested 67-year-old Robert Duvall captains a team of astronauts whose mission it is to kill the giant lump of space rock before it kills us. They fail (oh, how they fail) but not before Duvall’s Tanner gabbles off some excellent space nonsense: “We don’t have time to talk, Houston. We need the arming codes for the last four nukes!” Photograph: PR
Explorers on the Moon (1954)
Beating Neil Armstrong by well over a decade, that superbly competent child-journalist, Tintin, goes walking on the moon in the 17th instalment of Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin. He travels there in a red-checked rocket (nuclear-powered), taking along a few pals, as well as his dog, Snowy. Though there are Balkan spies to thwart and tanks to be piloted around the moon’s surface, much of Tintin’s energies are spent looking after that amiable ruin, Captain Haddock, who works his way through a crate of whisky on the trip, causing trouble Photograph: Little, Brown
The Simpsons (1994)
Unimprovable television, “Deep Space Homer” is an episode from The Simpsons’ 90s wonder period in which Nasa, trying to offset public ennui about “another boring space launch”, agrees to recruit “dangerously underqualified civilian” Homer Simpson for a mission. Bart is impressed. “Wow! My father an astronaut. I feel so full of… what’s the opposite of shame?” Homer jets out with Buzz Aldrin and almost wrecks their Corvair space shuttle with an incautiously opened packet of crisps. “Careful! They’re ruffled!” Photograph: Matt Groening
Around the Moon (1870)
A “projectile car” in the shape of a bullet conveys a trio of explorers (brainy Barbicane, brawny Nicholl and ludicrous Ardan) on their orbit around the moon in Jules Verne’s novella. Surely no astronauts have departed from the Earth’s atmosphere in such comfort: in an early illustrated edition, the trio were pictured on a pillowed couch, smoking cigars. When their trip takes a turn for the worse, imperilling their lives, the Frenchmen distract themselves by having breakfast – “crowned by a glorious bottle drawn from [Ardan’s] private cellar” Photograph: PR
Moonraker (1979)
The first Bond girl with a doctorate, Holly Goodhead tends to be maligned by 007 purists. She’s an improbable character (astronaut, astrophysicist and spy) in a charmless instalment (Moonraker is ranked the worst movie in the series by some). But I like her. In her best scenes, Goodhead seems to have the measure of Roger Moore’s Bond – the suave secret agent all thumbs in space and needing to be shuttled around by Goodhead like a bewildered tourist. Film scholars have pointed out that the character, played by Lois Chiles, was the first Bond girl who could do something 007 couldn’t Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Space Oddity (1969)
Released in the days leading up to the Apollo 11 launch, David Bowie’s Space Oddity went to No 5 in the UK charts and helped to make the musician a star. The song introduces us to Major Tom, “sitting in a tin can/Far above the world”, portrayed by Bowie in the original video as a skinny, silver-suited astronaut with a blue visor. Things don’t look hopeful for Tom at the end of this ambiguous song (“Your circuit’s dead/There’s something wrong!”) and, when the character reappears in Bowie’s 1980 track Ashes to Ashes, he has become a “junkie… better not mess with Major Tom” Photograph: PR
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Dr Frank Poole’s is the biggest space death in film (with all due apologies to Bruce Willis and the creators of 1998’s Armaggedon). Played by Gary Lockwood in Kubrick’s 60s masterpiece, Poole is tasked with servicing the Saturn-bound shuttle Discovery One. On a routine space walk to replace a faulty part, Poole is suddenly blasted off into space, his oxygen hose cut open. Once he stops thrashing and twirls away – a goner – his Discovery colleague is left to figure out what went wrong. It couldn’t be the work of HAL, the onboard computer with the sinister, thespy voice, could it? Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
The Eagle (1950-1969)
Introduced by kids’ comic The Eagle after the second world war, “pilot of the future” Dan Dare was a hero of that far-off age, the 1990s. In Dare’s 90s, cars fly, Venus is a holiday destination and military high-flyers such as him are still served by cheerful, deferential batmen from the lower ranks (pretty accurate, then). In comic-strip adventures spanning decades, Dare evolved from a uniformed, chinny astronaut into a camp, space-suited “hyper-hero”, at one point taking up painkillers, drink and mass murder in a story written by Grant Morrison in 1990 Photograph: PR
SpaceCamp (1986)
Beware the guided tour. While being shown around Nasa’s Atlantis shuttle (parked beningly on the launch pad) a group of school-aged kids find themselves being accidentally launched into space. So goes SpaceCamp, Harry Winer’s 1986 children’s film. Among the cast is a chubby, youthful Joaquin Phoenix. He plays Max, a 12-year-old whose robot friend, Jinx, is responsible for the launch-pad fiasco. Critics hated the film (and found the timing of its release, months after the Challenger explosion, distateful). But critics weren’t eight years old Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
