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.


 * 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
 * Is This Thing Still On?
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.