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I have already described the - shall we say - jockeying for position before take-off on the first flight to the moon. As it turned out, the American, Russian and British ships landed just about simultaneously...

Arthur C. Clarke from his book Venture to the Moon, 1956

The British Interplanetary Society formed in Liverpool in 1933, and, due to a British law prohibiting the building of rockets by private individuals, concentrated on theoretical work in astronautics. In 1937 it was decided to begin as study of a Lunar landing mission, in order to prove that such missions were possible.

1939 drawing of the Moonlander by:
R.A. Smith © British Interplanetary Society

The design created by the BIS was based on the most advanced technology then available: fairly small solid-fuel rockets developed by the army. The moon rocket, 30.5 meters high, 6.09 meters in diameter, and weighing 1000 tonnes, would use 2,490 solid-fuel rockets arranged in layers which fell away after use. This would be sufficient to allow the spacecraft to escape the Earth and begin its path to the moon.

The astronauts themselves would fly in a pressure cabin/lander mounted on top of the rocket, which looked remarkably like a mixture of the Apollo Landing and Command Modules. The crew of three would lie in couches for the launch itself, protected from the friction of the air against the rocket by a heat shield, while filters removed water vapour and Carbon Dioxide from the cabin. At the end of the mission, the capsule would return its passengers to the Earth by bleeding off speed against the atmosphere and then parachuting to the ground.

For the exploration of the moon itself, the three-man crew were to be provided with leather and rubber spacesuits designed by H.E. Ross. The suits included a radio, temperature control and an oxygen supply in a backpack, all features included in the Apollo suits 30 years later. The 1930s mission was very meticulously planned, with even the food supplies noted: bread, butter, cheese porridge and cocoa for energy. Coffee was included as an aid in the pre-computer age for "Navigators falling asleep over their interminable calculations".

The mission was redesigned by the BIS in 1949, to take account of the huge advances in rocketry brought on by the Second World War, most notably the V2. This mission used more efficient liquid fuel rather than solid rockets, and successfully predicted several features of the American landings of the 1960s.

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