Riders to the Stars was one of a group of films in the 1950s that were fascinated with the possibility of travel into space. The way was paved by the landmark Destination Moon (1950), which started the whole so-called ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’ off with an extraordinary optimism. The genre was subsequently almost entirely overwhelmed by menaces threatening it (alien invaders, atomic monsters) and seemed to lack the boldness of vision to conquer space that Destination Moon once saw as eminently within its grasp. The few ventures that did occur were invariably seen, as here, as something that could only be won at the cost of superhuman effort and life. It seemed that making the conceptual leap out there was so Herculean as to almost be beyond humanity’s power.

Riders to the Stars is a fascinating effort. Modern genre reviewers (John Brosnan, The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction) treat it contemptuously, principally for its nonsensical basic premise of sending up rockets to capture meteorites in the belief that meteorites are created out of a super-dense material that will be able to withstand the harshness of space. But the only real errors here are metallurgical ones. There’s nothing too much else in the film that falls outside the realms of at least possibility. One shouldn’t be too hard on it – after all it was only trying to imagine the nature of spaceflight when such never existed. It’s an easy film to be scathing about in the hindsight of the Space Mission but one must also remember that only a couple of years later most of the US’s attempts to launch rockets into space ended up with some 60 of them exploding on the launchpad, so clearly not even anybody in the real world had too many clues about what the right way of doing things was either. Nevertheless, Riders to the Stars makes interesting comparisons to the real Apollo mission – the space launch here is prepared in the space of two weeks rather than several years; all the tests and what the scientists are trying to achieve are conducted by keeping the astronauts fairly much in the dark as to what is happening; and there’s very little trial and error, just a great leap into the dark without the certainty it will work.

Certainly, Riders to the Stars is made with an absolute conviction in itself. Richard Carlson directs with a sense of almost documentary-like realism. He has, for example, gone and shot in a real centrifuge, cuts in real rocket launch footage and seems to be using real scientific equipment in the background, which is notable over the usual flashing lights that stand in for equipment in the science-fiction of the same era. Subsequent to the launch though, the film becomes less effective through the replacement of the aforementioned realism with far less convincing model rockets. Nevertheless, Richard Carlson compensates by cutting back and forward to the technical detail of the mission and creating some captivating scenes with Robert Karnes flipping out under pressure and going flying about the cabin.