Disneyland Attraction TWA Moonliner Takes Flight in Stunningly Nostalgic Make-Believe Clip

Ambitious as they are, modern-day space exploration projects can't come even close to the feeling of awe and wonder people of the 1950s and 1960s felt when looking at their future. For some reason, their dreams and aspirations seemed a lot more optimistic, more colorful, and a lot more exciting than ours.

We once again get a feeling of what it may have been like to live in that era thanks to a short nostalgic clip depicting something our elders may have enjoyed during their younger years over at Disneyland: the TWA Moonliner.

TWA would be, of course, Trans World Airlines, one of the largest carriers in the U.S. during the golden years of aviation and space exploration. Out of business since 2001, the company was owned for a few decades by aviation icon Howard Hughes.

The Moonliner was what Hughes envisioned TWA would operate several decades in his future, sometimes around the 1980s. A rocket-shaped commercial airliner that could transport people around the planet and who knows, maybe even to the Moon.

Back in the mid-1950s, when the concept was put together, we really had no means of leaving our planet, but people were dreaming about it. And they were dreaming about it while taking airplane trips here on Earth, at times using the services of airlines other than TWA.

So Hughes, the business genius that he was, saw an opportunity to mix product placement with people's dreams and need to have fun, and gave birth to the TWA Moonliner.

The design of the rocket was born in partnership with Walt Disney Imagineering. That's because the rocket was not meant to be a working prototype of an actual flying machine, but a neatly shaped billboard advertising TWA's business over at Disneyland's Tomorrowland. Yet it had to look like a real deal, so the man largely responsible for the birth of American rocketry, Wernher von Braun, had a hand in its design as well.

The contraption was part of the Rocket to the Moon display at Disneyland in the 1950s, and as shown there it stood 80 feet (24 meters) tall. It had a rocket body the kind of which the world was soon to get accustomed to, with a silver color on it that somewhat resembled the look of today's Starship. Naturally, the TWA logos were featured here and there.

The Moonliner was on display at Disneyland from 1955 to 1962, being for this entire time the tallest structure in the park. A 22-foot (6.7 meters) replica of the thing, called Moonliner II, was also installed by Hughes on the TWA corporate building in Kansas City.

Closer to our time, in 1998, a two-thirds version of the Moonliner was included in Disney's New Tomorrowland to advertise Coca-Cola.

Hughes gave up his grasp on TWA in 1960, so the original Moonliner made no more sense advertising this airline. The Douglas Aircraft Company stepped in and took over, replacing only the color scheme and the logos featured on the rocket's nose and landing legs with its own.

Despite being an advertising display, the Moonliner was for a short while considered the precursor of something real, so it came with portholes, a cockpit, and a boarding ramp for passengers.

Had it been made for real, the Moonliner would have been operating sometime in the 1980s, and would have been 200 feet (61 meters) tall. A nuclear reactor was envisioned as the main means of propulsion.

It's unclear how many passengers would have been able to travel in it, but they most likely would have done so in luxury and style.

The last known reference to the Disneyland TWA Moonliner dates back to the early 1980s, when it was spotted somewhere on the park's estate. It's unclear what happened to it since, but smaller replicas can still be seen here and there throughout the park.

A life-size, functioning rocket was never made, so sadly we have no way of saying how it might have looked in flight. Or do we?

Thanks to modern technology, animation specialist Hazegrayart recently gave us a glimpse of the TWA Moonliner in action, taking off from a digital launch pad. It's a short clip, under a minute long, but more than enough to awaken in us a feeling of nostalgia one rarely gets to experience these days.

You can have a taste of that for yourselves, and get all those amazing 1950s vibes back, in the video attached below this text.