Maybe they were building a bank?

When I was a kid in the seventies, like lots of other kids, I watched the many TV sitcoms from the sixties that played every day in local syndication. Among the shows I watched was I Dream of Jeannie, starring Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman.

One of the cool things about the show was that they occasionally had story arcs over several episodes, which was unusual at the time. In one arc, Jeannie accidently got locked in a NASA safe. She was in there long enough that whoever opened the safe would be her new master. What's more, the safe was booby-trapped so that it would blow up if forced or the combination entered incorrectly. The arc ran for four episodes and the network actually ran a contest for fans to guess the combination of the safe. The ridiculous combination 4-7-9 was the winning entry. (No double digits?)

As a kid, I really enjoyed the arc, but I don't think the following ever occurred to me until this morning.

The driving tension of the story was a ticking clock to get Jeannie out. Not only because someone else would be her master if they opened it before Major Nelson, but because NASA WAS SENDING THE SAFE TO THE MOON.

If you know anything about space launches, you know that every single ounce in a payload costs fuel, space in the rocket, and money. And NASA was sending a large, extremely heavy, SAFE. For what possible purpose? Were aliens going to steal our moon stuff? Or maybe the Russians, who never made it to the moon? And NASA expected an astronaut in a spacesuit to successfully open the safe on the moon without getting blown up? It's an absolutely baffling, ridiculous and contrived storyline, when they could have just made it a locked time capsule that would be buried for a hundred years or something.

I know, I'm getting worked up over a show that had a NASA astronaut find a hot genie in a bottle and not only wouldn't let her grant any wishes, but he refused her advances for years, while another NASA astronaut (Major Healy) couldn't get a date to save his life. Ponder that. A NASA astronaut in the 1960s couldn't get a date. Realism wasn't exactly the show's strong suit. 

But still, sending a safe to the Moon?!?