Pollee and I somehow landed on the topic of “t-minus” yesterday morning and so began a search for the beginnings of the phrase.
The hunt led us to discovering Frau im Mond.
From Wikipedia:
Though the special effects used in the movie were novel, the movie was not a financial success. The failure can be partly attributed to the public’s decreasing interest in silent films by 1929.
This film is often cited as the first movie containing a rocket-launching sequence: the “countdown to zero”. The launch crew counts down the seconds from ten to zero and the rocket ship then blasts off into space.
Since rocket scientist Hermann Oberth worked as an advisor on this movie (he had originally intended to build a working rocket for use in the film; time and technology kept this from happening), it was popular among the rocket scientists in Wernher von Braun’s circle at the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR). The first successfully launched V-2 rocket at the rocket development facility in Peenemünde had the Frau im Mond logo painted on its base. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which deals with the V2 rockets, refers to this along with several other classic German silent films.
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