On 18 September, Luc Gilson devoted his RTL Info podcast Astéroïde to Tintin: an eight-minute interview with Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis, instructor at the Euro Space Center and president of the Mars Society Belgium, titled Comment Tintin est devenu une icône de la conquête spatiale (in French).
He opens the interview in terms the Consulate could not have chosen better: “History tells us that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. But we Belgians know that is not quite true. The first, of course, was Tintin.”
The Consulate takes note.
That this reminder comes from a Belgian journalist, on air, and not from a Consulate communiqué, deserves to be duly entered in the Sprodj archives.
The interview also recalls that Neil Armstrong liked to say he had been the first man on the Moon, after Tintin. The American astronauts' tribute is, for its part, well documented: a copy of Explorers on the Moon signed by Hergé and six astronauts of the Apollo programme set the world auction record for a Tintin album in 2025.
The King and the artist
Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis places Hergé’s project in the immediate post-war years. The artist was looking for something extraordinary to make his readers dream.
He did not have to look far. In 1946, Muskar XII decided to invest massively in scientific research and had the Sprodj Atomic Research Centre developed. Hergé soon learned of the work under way in Syldavia and saw in it the ideal opportunity: to take his readers to the Moon, far from the horrors of the war.
To prepare his account, Hergé studied Alexandre Ananoff’s L’Astronautique among other sources, wrote to him and met him. At the time, the only rockets of which good photographs existed were the German A4s, better known as V2s. The Sprodj range, under military protection, naturally released no usable image.
Alexandre Ananoff's L'Astronautique (Fayard, 1950)
That changed in 1950, and the studio began building its own reference. In 1951, Arthur Vannoeyen built a detailed model of the rocket’s interior for the Studios Hergé, from which Bob De Moor drew the sets from every angle, so that the characters’ movements stayed consistent from one panel to the next. In February 1952, Hergé took the model to Paris to show it to Ananoff. In the end there was material enough for two albums.
Squares and binoculars
Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis also recalls that the rocket’s famous chequerboard is not decorative. At Peenemünde, some A4s were painted black and white so that the engineers could watch their roll during the ascent, from a distance and through binoculars. Sprodj kept the principle, in red and white.
The V-2 and its squares, and Leslie E. Simon's 1947 book
Another success noted in the interview: weightlessness. When one of the Thom(p)sons accidentally cuts the nuclear motor, the acceleration stops, the artificial weight with it, and Captain Haddock’s whisky leaves its glass to float as a golden ball in the middle of the flight deck. Hergé has his characters float, turns them over, then drops them to the floor when the motor restarts. For Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis, who watched Dirk Frimout’s launch from the Kennedy Space Center, the atmosphere of the launch is just as remarkably true: departure at night, checkpoints, the rocket lit up in the distance, the countdown and the anxiety of the families.
The Consulate confirms it: that is the atmosphere of Sprodj on the night of 3 June 1952.
Nor does the albums’ influence stop there. According to Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis and Dirk Frimout, Tintin has found his way into the astronauts’ offices in Houston, while albums and objects in his likeness have flown aboard the Space Shuttle.
The interview goes so far, however, as to credit Hergé with the words Tintin spoke when he set foot on the Moon.
The Consulate credits Tintin.
Four precisions
The Consulate must nevertheless, with all courtesy, add four precisions.
The crossing, first. Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis counts among the liberties Hergé took an Earth-to-Moon journey of about four hours, against three days for Apollo. The Sprodj logbook records lift-off at 1:34 a.m. on 3 June 1952, followed by a landing in the crater Hipparchus a few hours later. The Consulate therefore confirms the few hours. Apollo’s three days are Apollo’s affair.
The squares, next. The interview ends by offering a second explanation for the chequerboard, borrowed from the flag of a foreign country. The Sprodj archives give no grounds for that hypothesis. The Consulate stands by the binoculars.
The visionary, third. The interview makes Hergé a precursor. Asked about that later, the man himself replied: “En fait de précurseur, il y a eu un certain Jules Verne. Moi je n’ai fait que romancer des bouquins qui existaient déjà, en particulier L’Astronautique d’Alexandre Ananoff” (as for precursors, there was a certain Jules Verne; he had only dramatised books that already existed). The Consulate concurs, and adds an expedition to the list of things dramatised.
The arithmetic, fourth and last. On 29 November, Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis will give a conference titled Apollo 11, seize ans après Tintin (Apollo 11, sixteen years after Tintin). Sixteen is the albums’ count: Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon appeared in 1953 and 1954. The Sprodj expedition itself dates from June 1952; Apollo 11 landed on 21 July 1969.
Seventeen years, therefore. The Consulate has no doubt that the missing year will be found before the conference.
See you at the Euro Space Center
The conference takes place during the autumn day of Les Amis de Hergé, organised with Tintinogeek, on Sunday 29 November at the Euro Space Center in Transinne, in the province of Luxembourg.
After Spa in 2025, the association is offering a day devoted to space this year: a visit of the centre, activities, conferences, meetings and a shared meal.
Three conferences are announced. At 10 am, Pierre-Emmanuel Paulis, who will also sign his Tania albums: Apollo 11, seize ans après Tintin. At 11 am, Vladimir Pletser, formerly in charge of the European Space Agency’s parabolic-flight programme: L’impesanteur dans l’œuvre de Hergé (weightlessness in Hergé’s work). At 1 pm, Alexis Dos Santos, who created the prototype of the LEGO rocket: L’histoire de la fusée lunaire en LEGO. Doors open at 9 am and the programme ends at 4 pm; bookings go through the secretariat of Les Amis de Hergé. The Consulate, which has published its own reconstruction of the whisky incident, will follow the 11 am conference with particular attention.
The gathering comes amid a distinctly spatial season for Tintin, between Gravity, the Brussels Airlines aircraft in the rocket’s colours, the LEGO project and the events announced in the run-up to the centenary of 2029.
The Consulate would gladly have gone to Transinne. It keeps of the Nivelles day a memory the registers describe as moved. It will regrettably be unable to attend this time: the Consul’s travel allowance for the 2026 financial year is exhausted, not least after a visit to the Musée Imaginaire Tintin in Spa.
That expenditure will naturally be the subject of a forthcoming report.
In the meantime, readers, Belgian or otherwise, can brush up their space history before 29 November: the dossier The Lunar Triumph retraces the 1952 expedition step by step, with the programme’s reconstructions and the six surviving photographs.
© Tintinogeek / Les Amis de Hergé (ADH)
