@wisetheta: I didn't put a logo on a spaceship in 1968 because it looked good. I put it there because it was honest. A spaceship named Orion III slowly approaches a rotating space station, shuttling people to orbit from Earth. Emblazoned on its side was the iconic blue and white Pan Am logo. A winged, arrow-shaped spaceship, the Pan American, dart-like space shuttle Orion, soars from Earth through space toward the Moon, bound first for Space Station 5 - a wheel-shaped way-station for passengers. Then Floyd transfers to a near-spherical Aries-1B Moon shuttle to begin his journey to the U.S. base in 150-mile-wide Clavius crater. I showed you a commute. Not a mission. A commute. And people believed it so much that in 1968 Pan Am turned its joke reservation list into something real: the First Moon Flights Club. Pan Am never took money or issued reservations. Instead, those on the list became members of the First Moon Flights Club, and received a numbered membership card. 93,000 people signed up. Pan Am's futuristic Orion III space plane, as seen in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, made that future easy to imagine. Pan Am went bankrupt. The idea didn't. You are sitting in a room in Orlando talking about a base in Clavius — the same crater I put on screen — talking about how to get there on a commercial ticket. That was the whole point of 2001. Not that technology would save us. That capitalism would finally learn to sell the right seat. You don't need to revive Pan Am because you miss the logo. You need to revive it because for the first time in 60 years, you can actually honor the reservation cards. Flight PA2157 is now boarding at Space Station 5. Clavius is not fiction anymore. It's real estate. Let's not miss the gate again. #nssmagazine #whythemoon #moonsettosunrise

Antonio-Mihai Ciobanu

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Sunday 25 October 2026 15:16:09 GMT