The Von Braun enters orbit around the planet and deploys a large orbiting station to monitor it from space. The technology in Alien Planet, although far more advanced than what we have available today, is based upon careful extrapolation from the present. As the narrator notes, many of the scientists who are there to study the data returned from Darwin IV were not even born when the craft was first dispatched. The spacecraft, the Von Braun, travels at 20% of the speed of light and it arrives at Darwin IV five decades after leaving earth. The planet is named Darwin IV and Earth sends a sophisticated robotic spacecraft to explore it. The story is set at some unstated time in the future, when Earth detects a life-bearing planet in orbit around the star Darwin, several light-years away. The book was heavily illustrated and attempted to describe a completely alien ecosystem as if it was real.īarlowe served as executive producer of the TV version, but Alien Planet departs from the book in a number of key ways. The expedition itself was led by a race of intelligent aliens who had taken humans under their tutelage. Expedition was written as a report of a visit to an alien biosphere in the 24th century.

The show is based upon a highly-regarded 1980s science fiction book by artist Wayne Barlowe called Expedition. Instead, the fictional characters are robots and alien lifeforms, with real scientists making appearances. In comparison to Voyage to the Planets, Alien Planet uses no human actors. << page 1: Voyage to the Planets Alien Planet

An astronaut explores the surface of Io in a scene from Voyage to the Planets.

Expedition darwin iv