Cut to Mount Everest, where Japanese mountain climber Goro Saruwatari and his American friend Jack "Lostman" Woodbridge are headed for the peak with minimal equipment, and in spite of dangerous weather brewing. They're daredevils, to some extent, but they're also lucky, arrogant, headstrong and confident of their own abilities. When they reach the peak, they're clearly unimpressed with the challenge, the results and the fact that there's no higher place on Earth to reach: "I'm was starting to get tired of this anyway," Lostman grunts. "Let's do something else." Looking up, they see a space station, and agree that the next stop is outer space.

Cut to four years later, when Lostman has returned to America and become a Navy pilot and a contender for the space program. Goro, in the meantime, has returned to Japan and become a construction worker, highly skilled in a wide variety of heavy machinery and robotic prosthetics. With the discovery of a new, bountiful source of energy on the moon, the international community is pooling its resources to launch a new joint space commission that will build harvesting facilities on the moon, and the construction boom means Goro, too, is about to be tapped to go into space. Meanwhile, the prospect of a new energy source has caused political turmoil on Earth, particularly among oil-rich states, and the U.S. is headed into the Second Gulf War. Given the demand for the moon's energy, it isn't hard to see how a private concern—possibly one with robot soldiers—could end up on Luna, and want to keep its presence covered up.

From muscle-bound Earth to the Moon

Moonlight Mile lands somewhere about halfway between Wings of Honneamise and Macross Plus, with its story of thick-headed macho competition and its nuts-and-bolts details about a space program, and how politics, nationalism and personal trials affect it. Goro and Lostman are basically talented Neanderthals; both use women as objects (especially for their pre-adventure "good-luck ritual") and barely acknowledge other men at all. Even the thick, hyper-muscled character design makes Goro in particular look like an ape, and his personal habits, which lean toward frequent drunkenness and public nudity, don't help.

Neither one of them is very interesting as a character, in large part because they're so unexpressive, and so uninterested in their surroundings. When they witness other climbers dying in an avalanche on Everest, they're apathetic and mildly annoyed—they drag the corpses for a while before getting tired of the weight, and they bring the sole survivor along, but shrug at her pain, terror and eventual death. When Lostman's plane is shot down in the Middle East and he's captured, tortured and then rescued by a philosophical father and resentful young son, he impatiently treats them as lackeys and the whole business as an irritant. Both men are generally incurious, dismissive and unrooted, and the episodic plotlines are similarly blunt; there's no room for nuance, slow plot development, or emotional complexities in their world, so their stories tend to be simple and not very well developed.

But the exception that makes the series is the way it handles space travel, with loving animation and a great deal of technical and visual detail. Moonlight Mile makes heavy use of elegant, smooth CGI for its mechanical devices, from space stations to combat machines, and the visualization of the surface of the moon is so real that it gives the series a you-are-there depth. (Viewers may just wish they were there with less lunkish protagonists as companions.) But anyone interested in near-future space travel will likely find plenty of interest in Moonlight Mile's absorbing lunar jaunts. For the characters, it's just another rote challenge, but for the series itself, it's an endlessly fascinating topic and a source of ceaseless wonder.