I Want to Ride My Bike on the Moon

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Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey was a collision between art and science. Astronomer Carl Sagan gave the filmmaker advice on whether to depict extraterrestrials and MGM commissioned the space artist Robert McCall, who had been making paintings for NASA, to produce promotional art for the film. Firms including IBM, Honeywell, GE and Bell Labs supplied documentation and design assistance, and several got on-screen visibility. Later, Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction icon who co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick and published the accompanying novel, would become a fixture on television discussing the ongoing space race. 

In 2008, NASA celebrated the legacy of the film with a message from astronaut Garrett Reisman recorded from the International Space Station and shared during the film’s 40th anniversary celebration. The history of the film, and NASA’s relationship with it, is recounted on the agency’s website: “The film’s premise of an extensive space infrastructure including a large orbiting space station staffed by international crewmembers, with regular trips to a lunar base by 2001, was visionary and highly optimistic at a time of great uncertainty,” John Uri writes. We think the film’s afterlife is a perfect example of the creative case for investing in space. 

Our creative team believes that imagination precedes ambition. The concept for our short film began with one line: “I want to ride my bike on the moon.” Like the childhood dreams of physicist Carlo Rovelli, which kicked off this GC blog series, we wanted to represent space as a fantasy that humanity never outgrows. “The kid I was grew up convinced that my destiny was flying through the stars with my own tiny can, free like a pirate,” Rovelli writes. 

Though we may reconfigure our child’s sense of what is possible, what once seemed naive in scientific progress is remembered as inevitable. But this doesn’t happen without the right resources. 

Just as “a bone is thrown in the air and dissolves into a spacecraft,” as described by John Uri, at the end of the first movement in Kubrick’s film, we imagine a bike dropped into the grass can become a satellite, an orbiting data center, or even a moon colony. It just takes the right builders to do it.