Space Force

Space Force was a BBC Radio science fiction serial, broadcast in the mid-1980s.

Written by Charles Chilton, it was originally intended to be a sequel to his Journey into Space series (broadcast in the 1950s), using the cast who'd just made a one-off revival of that series (The Return From Mars); while this idea was dropped late in the day, the four characters are nevertheless essentially the same as those from the earlier series, albeit with different names.

The first series begins during the northern summer of 2010. Both series seem to initially mirror the first two Journey Into Space stories before branching off into quite different plots. Some of the dialogue in the first episode, "The Voice from Nowhere", references time becoming unstuck and that the year 2010 may now be in the future. This suggests the story was to originally follow the plot of "Operation Luna" more closely before it was changed, and time travel was removed.

A second series, known as Space Force 2, featured the same main characters, once again played by Barry Foster, Nigel Stock, Nicky Henson, and Tony Osoba.

Within both series, "Space Force" is the name of the team's spaceship, rather than the name of an organisation.

Each episode had an approximate run-time of 30 minutes.

First series

The episodes of the first series, broadcast in 1984, were:

1. "The Voice from Nowhere"
2. "Towards the Unknown"
3. "The Silver Strangers"
4. "The Time Ship"
5. "Threshold of the Stars"
6. "Marooned in Space"

Second series

The episodes of the second series, broadcast in 1985, were:

1. "The Return of the Sun God"
2. "The Red Planet"
3. "The Great Martian Pyramid"
4. "A Test of Endurance"
5. "Living with Death"
6. "Unto Death and Beyond"

Characters

The main characters in Space Force were:

Character	Actor	Equivalent character from Journey Into Space	Description
Captain Saxon Berry	Barry Foster	Jet Morgan	Captain of the Space Force and leader of the team. Also captained the Lunar 9 freighter for the first episode of the first series before being transferred to the Space Force.
Lodderick Sincere	Tony Osoba	Steven Mitchell	The flight engineer for Space Force, a keen astronomer who sometimes is enough hot-headed to get himself and the team into trouble.
Lemuel "Chipper" Barnet	Nicky Henson	Lemmy Barnet	The radio operator for Space Force. The joker of the group who also struggles with the terrifying situations the team face. In a direct link to Journey into Space, Chipper refers once to his grandfather, Lemmy Barnett.
Professor Magnus Carter	Nigel Stock	Doc Matthews	Added to the Lunar 9 crew under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Magnus is part of a secret organisation searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Music

Both the first and second series reused commercially-available incidental music by Jerry Goldsmith. Cues from Logan's Run, Outland, and Capricorn One can be heard in series one, while music from The Wind and the Lion, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Gremlins and Alien can be heard in series two.