Salvage 1

"Once Upon a Time...a junkman had a dream..."I wanna build a spaceship, go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, sell it." So he put together a team: An ex-astronaut, and a fuel expert. They built a spaceship, and they went to the moon. Who knows what they'll do next?"

Salvage 1 is an American science fiction series that aired for 16 episodes (of the 20 produced) on ABC during 1979. The pilot film, Salvage, aired on January 20, 1979, to high ratings. The movie starred Andy Griffith as junkyard owner Harry Broderick, Joel Higgins as Addison "Skip" Carmichael and Trish Stewart as NASA fuel expert Melanie "Mel" Slozar, who pool their talents to build a high-powered rocket out of literal scrap, to go to The Moon and salvage all the equipment NASA left there after the Apollo lunar missions for sale back on earth.

The pilot film ended with the successful completion of the mission, and NASA buying every bit of salvage off them. The subsequent series stayed earthbound for the most part, with the Vulture mostly being used to move the cast from plot to plot.


 * Cool Spaceship: The Vulture.  Built in a 1979 scrap yard from parts including a gasoline truck, a cement mixer and some old tires, the Millenium Falcon ain't got nothing on this baby when it comes to being a miraculously functional "piece of junk." It took its crew of a junkman, a former astronaut, and a propulsion expert all the way to the Moon and back to salvage NASA's collectibles.
 * Crazy Enough to Work: Go to the moon to salvage abandoned pieces of tech by means of a homemade rocket, powered by homemade explodium, driven by a NASA reject. Yeah.
 * Down in the Dumps: Took place mostly in a junkyard.
 * Is This Thing Still On?: In the pilot, Skip Carmichael suggests to Mel Slozar a way they might wile away the time on their flight to the moon. When she demurs, he asks if would help if he closed the blind. Their ground control then comes over the radio saying "No, but you might want to turn off your microphone".
 * MacGyvering: The Vulture, to some extent.
 * Made for TV Movie / Compilation Movie: In addition to the Two Hour Pilot movie, the two part episodes "Golden Orbit" and "Hard Water" were combined in the late eighties and aired as "movies" on CBS Late Night.
 * My Name Is Not Shazam: The spaceship is called the Vulture, not Salvage 1.
 * Once Upon a Time: Used in the original opening monologue, as quoted above.
 * Plot-Sensitive Items: monohydrazine was used to solve any number of problems, from fueling a rocket to restarting oil wells.
 * Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The cast is pretty much this.
 * Schizo-Tech: The Vulture is very much this kind of device, a constant-boost spacecraft built from a tanker truck, a cement mixing truck, and various other components from a late-70s junk yard.
 * The Seventies: So very much so.
 * Unobtainium: Mel bestows upon our heroes a special fuel she calls "monohydrazine," which is so efficient that their space rocket can burn its engines all the way to the moon and back, despite having almost no room on board for fuel storage.
 * Zero-G Spot: Skip suggests the idea to Mel in Salvage as a way to kill time on the flight to the moon.