In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a lengthy scene-setting sequence is devoted to scientist Heywood Floyd’s transit to the moon, where he has a date with a mysterious alien monolith discovered at Clavius crater.

The space race was at the time coming to its heady peak, with Neil Armstrong then in training for his landmark lunar mission aboard Apollo 11. To convey that mankind by 2001 would have moved on from such high-stakes adventures, Kubrick entrusts Floyd to a more prosaic carrier: Pan American Airways. As the Pan Am Aries 1B cruises through space, Dr Floyd is fussed over by two stewardesses who negotiate the zero gravity environment in shoes designed to grip the floor. ‘We see that space has been conquered,’ observed reviewer Joseph Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. ‘We also see it has been commercialised and, within the limits of man’s tiny power, domesticated.’