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Does it really surprise you that Tintin landed on the Moon seventeen years before Neil Armstrong did? The truth is that Hergé was a methodical cartoonist, who planned his graphic stories down to the smallest detail. He thoroughly researched each and every aspect he wanted to show in his albums. The adventures of the intrepid reporter and his dog Snowy captivate because they are real. Tintin lives in a comic strip, but also in our world, and the journey he made in the years 1950-1952 (in installments), and which the American space agency copied in 1969, is irrefutable proof.
Have you ever wondered why Tintin's Moon doesn't feature, for example, fantastic animals, UFOs, or aliens? Its author wanted that, when flesh-and-blood man went to the Moon, outside the comic strips, he would arrive at the same place where his character had already been.Do you remember the rocket that illustrates the cover of Objective: the Moon, the one with red and white squares that Tintin and his dog approach, accompanied by Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus? Well, its design is based on a ballistic missile, the V2 rocket, which the Nazis developed at the beginning of World War II and which caused the death of more than seven thousand people, civilians and military, in London and Antwerp.
For Hergé, those photographs served to invent a less deadly device. But he didn't stop there, in the preparation of his double lunar album, which completed Destination Moon. He consulted numerous press reports about man's attempt to reach his satellite, read books by the popular science fiction writer Pierre Rousseau and the physicist Auguste Piccard, and also L'Astronautique, published in 1950, in which the physicist Alexander Ananoff spoke of space travel. He even corresponded with him. The cartoonist also visited scientific research centers for inspiration.
All this information served Hergé, thanks to the help of collaborators such as the Belgian cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans and the comic book writer Jacques van Melkebeke, to shape some loose ideas, which at the beginning of 1948 were reduced to sketches of Haddock trying to drink a whiskey that weightlessness made escape him. Have you ever wondered why, for example, fantastic animals, UFOs, or extraterrestrials do not appear on Tintin's Moon? Its author wanted that when the man of flesh and blood went to the Moon, outside the comic strips, he would arrive at the same place where his character had already been.
Otherwise, the excellent exhibition hosted by CosmoCaixa, Tintin and the Moon. 50 years since the first manned mission, would not have been possible. Would Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin -who also stepped on the satellite- and Michael Collins have read Hergé's double album when they landed on the moon? Even the words "this is one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind" recall Tintin's upon his arrival: "for the first time in the history of Mankind there is an explorer on the Moon." Let's reflect, were they perhaps his inspiration?
The exhibition, which we can visit until next May 26, brings together the two realities, that of Milú's friends and that of Apollo XI, to commemorate that on July 20 it will be half a century since the arrival of a manned mission to the Moon - or the Hollywood setup, depending on who explains it to you. There are full-size reconstructions of the Eagle lunar module with which Aldrin and Armstrong descended to the lunar surface and the Columbia module with which the three astronauts returned. Even, although not with a whiskey, the visitor can experience gravity on the Moon and observe its landscape.
A fragment of the Moon can also be observed, just as you are reading it. The American crew spent a couple of hours collecting samples. Little time compared to the two weeks Tintin spent, who even confirmed that there was water there.The exhibition also reviews human aspirations, Galileo's studies and a reproduction of his first telescope, from 1609, as well as ideas for when it will be possible to establish a colony or do space tourism. And, of course, to see that there have been other missions to the Moon after the best known one, although we are not in the habit of stopping to think about it.
A fragment of the Moon can also be observed, just as you are reading it. The American crew spent a couple of hours collecting samples. Little time compared to the two weeks Tintin spent, who even confirmed that there was water there. Clothes, Hergé's sketches, objects for traveling to space, some of which are as prosaic as toothpaste or a bag to collect astronaut excrement. All this and, above all, the possibility of verifying that what we imagine one day can become reality, make a visit to CosmoCaixa a must this winter.