William Lundigan

Men Into Space a black-and-white weekly television series aired between September 1959 and September 1960. The star of the series was the actor William Lundigan, who played Colonel Ed McCauley. It was the first attempt at a realistic portrayal of what engineers believed it would be like in the near future when manned space flight to Earth orbit, the Moon, asteroids, and Mars became routine. Although it is clear in retrospect that the creators of the series were much too optimistic about how easy it would be to build such things as a cheap ground-to-orbit and ground-to-Moon transportation system, a space station providing rotation-induced artificial gravity, and a permanently manned Moon base, they were surprisingly accurate in their predictions in many ways.