Barcelona Moon Team held a conference last Wednesday at the Magna Aula in the Central University of Barcelona, the oldest within the city’s universities. The conference was framed within the open doors day for high school students. On that day, the students can get close to the different possibilities they may chose in a close future.

Marc Zaballa, BMT associate team leader, and Manuel Barrios, staff of the national broadcasting company and director of the popular children tv program “Una mà de contes”, presented the team’s mission in a different perspective: the imaginarium of the Moon trip in arts and science, and how arts are a powerful driver for human race, who after imagining it, always look for the ways to make it real.

Manuel Barrios showed as a novelty, the new chapter of his tv program in which an imaginary Moon travel is shown as a kid’s dream, which afterwards results inspiring for his father. Realized in collaboration with Barcelona Moon Team, the chapter shows a more “accurate” approach, with a countdown and the different propulsion stages for the rocket launch.

In fact, these topics where already imagined by Fritz Lang in his 1929 movie “Woman in the Moon”, that featured for the first time a launch with public such as NASA later did, and the 5…4…3…2…1…0! The countdown was a dramatic resort to create tension on the audience.

Both cinema and literature already imagined many trips to the Moon before it actually happened in 1969: Lang’s “Woman in the Moon” is from 1929, George Meliè’s “A trip to the Moon” is from 1902, Jules Verne’s novel “From the Earth to the Moon” was written in 1865… and even before that the Moon has always been inspiring humanity that imagined gods and goddesses travelling and living on the Moon.

All these stories are an important imaginarium which afterwards inspire scientists and engineers to design the rockets and lunar landers. At the end, if nobody dreams about it previously, who will make it possible?