Mik Kanrokitoff: Did he watch Tintin's Moon voyage?

I'm tempted to think Mik Kanrokitoff and/or his spaceship were watching our heroes' journey to the Moon and the Moon landing - on the quiet, and from a distance.
It is inconceivable that Kanrokitoff didn't know about the Moon voyage, and with that spaceship he would have a ringside seat.

It is tempting to think that they rescued Wolff, and maybe even did something to stop the tottering rocket falling on its side without our heroes realising. Or maybe they had strict rules not to interfere, even if our heroes ran out of oxygen and died on the way.

What do others think? Could Mik Kanrokitoff and his spaceship been quietly watching the moon voyage?

I like the "rescued Wolfe" theory, I always did want him to survive. :(

There is a thread elsewhere on this forum which examines the question of whether Wolff survived. I posted a reply there that there was no way Wolff could have survived unless Kanrokitoff's spaceship picked him up. It's the only theory that fits.

I don't believe it for an instant. The theory is way too kooky.

Probably it is too kooky, but so is the idea that Wolff would have survived at all.

Now that's an interesting idea which I've never heard discussed before, that of Wolff being rescued by the Astroship. I suppose that since space travel had been accomplished Mik Kanrokitoff probably decided that the people who had been there had to meet him. Maybe all of the events in Flight 714 happened because he wanted them to. He could hypnotise people to get them to do things, and then he gets to meet those who went to the moon. It was all his idea!

It's debatable whether the aliens in Flight 714 are all that good at rescuing people. They leave Tintin and his friends drifting back towards the volcano to be boiled, steamed or fried alive at the end of the book, which seems careless to say the least. It's only by good fortune that the film crew on the plane spots them and rescues them. You'd have thought that with all that technology and intelligence, the aliens would have some knowledge of tidal currents and would have towed the dinghy somewhere safer. They've been visiting that island for many centuries, after all.

And even if the dinghy had remained in the open sea sea, Tintin and the others could have died before ever being spotted and rescued.

So I'm not sure that Hergé intended the aliens to be seen as entirely reliable as guardian angels. Maybe they were keeping an eye on the moon mision. But I'm not sure they'd have managed to intervene to save Wolff's life or anyone elses, or necessarily cared enough to do so.

Of course the Flight 714 aliens aren't the first extra-trerrestial life forms that feature in the Tintin books. The mushrooms from the meteorite in The Shooting Star offer definite proof that life exists in other parts of the universe. I wonder if the aliens were keeping an eye on that expedition as well.

Of course, we do not know whether or not Wolff was even wearing a spacesuit when he left the rocket. If he wasn't, than it is a sure thing that he wouldn't have had a chance to be saved because he would have died almost immediately (sounds a bit like a part in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) but if he was wearing a spacesuit, he would probably have about five minutes.

Unless of course the mushrooms just grew from spores which were either in the air or stuck to Tintin's clothes. I always just assumed that they were just earth mushrooms which were experiencing the effects of Phostlite.

But why would he wear a spacesuit? Isn't that contradicting why he left the spacecraft? To save oxygen?

I can see your logic about not wearing a spacesuit if his aim was to save oxygen, Leviticus. But surely using the airlock without a spacesuit would mean losing a whole airlock-full of oxygen when he opened the outer door. If he did it that way, both he and all the air would get sucked out instantly into the vaccuum of space.

Whereas if he wore a space suit (with just half a minute's worth of oxygen in the breathing cylinder) he'd be able to pump the airlock's oxygen back into the inner part of the rocket ship before opening the outer door and jumping out.

He wouldn't be able to do it this second way without a space suit, of course, since the moment he sent all the airlock's oxygen back into the inner part of the rocket ship, he'd die, and wouldn't then be able to open the outer door at all.

So I think the second way - ie: wearing a space suit with just enough oxygen in the tank to give him time to empty the airlock's oxygen into the rocket, open the outer door and jump - would be the least oxygen-wasting way to leave the rocket.

Of course, the most oxygen-saving way of killing himself would have been to simpy kill himself on board without leaving the rocket at all. But that would be less poetic, more unpleasant for his colleagues to discover, and somehow a more blatant act of suicide (which, as discussed, was something Hergé felt obliged to shy away from portraying.) Still, given how close to death they get at the end, especially Haddock, saving every last possble atom of oxygen would have been more sensible of Wolff. (Or would the stress of finding his dead body have increased everyone's breathing rate to the point that it cancelled out the benifit of the saved oxygen?)

Anyway, to get back on topic, I think he would be wearing a space suit, and could theoretically have been picked up by a flying saucer if they were very quick about it!