You have to remember that it was written in the 1930’s, well before any of the modern technology was even dreamed of. Metallurgy was still an alchemy of sorts.
This book should be re-made into a modern movie with all the computer graphics and special effects available. It would be a huge blockbuster!
The commies could be replaced with muslims....................
If someone were to make a movie, the interesting part would be the afterworld stuff, where the refugee Earthlings struggled for survival on the new planet. Dragging feet on the whole can we/can’t we on the rocket construction would be pointless, except maybe to Steven Spielberg.
In the old movie, after the ship (there was only one) landed, the leader said, open the doors. Wait, someone said, shouldn’t we check the atmosphere. He said, we’ll have to leave this ship or we’ll die anyway, just open ‘em now. Something like that. It was good that the movie went out on an inspiring note.
A modern rewrite should start with a spacewatch facility, where Earth-crossers are looked for, and always wind up being reclassified as not dangerous, or not dangerous for a long time to come.
The first 20 or 25 minutes is spent in the discovery of the interloping body, a rarity coming from outside the Solar System, on a hyperbolic trajectory, creates a teaching moment to dispel some of the completely idiotic misconceptions (for example it’s a fact that an object a mile wide would kill 99 percent of the human race and end civilization, literacy, and communication for a tremendously long time).
The movie characters would struggle with the need to keep the information secret to avoid complete chaos. Since it’s Hollywood, some intrepid reporter would be on the scent, but would keep quiet because one of the scientist in the know would be uncharacteristically attractive and they’d start a mad passionate affair.
The movie would be set in the future, when there’s already a large, permanent lunar base and a bigger, and private enterprise, space travel infrastructure. Just for laughs, a remake of “2001” would be shooting on the Moon, or will have just wrapped, and the prop monolith and stuff would be used during a Moon walk when two or more characters are discussing expansion of the base, while trying to pussyfoot around the secret of the imminent impact.
Without warning, and within a day of that meeting, the selected refugees arrive with loads of supplies, massive archives of seeds, domesticated animal gametes, the works.
The impact would take place around the 45 minute mark, and take perhaps 10 or 15 minutes of accurate simulations of the 100 percent profound cloud and soot cover that would block all the sunlight from the Earth’s surface for years (or perhaps decades); the freezing of water; the reduction to near-zero of the hydrologic cycle; the nighttime predators being up and active 24/7; the deaths of all large terrestrial animal species; and at the end showing a survivors’ makeshift camp, or perhaps more than one.
Some movie time had passed, perhaps a year after the impact, and the state of the lunar base is overcrowded. The various spacecraft which would have returned as usual to the Earth obviously hadn’t been able to do that, and those which could made their way to the base.
There’s an ongoing expansion of the base, and work has begun on planning for moving to the Martian surface. There’s already been a permanent manned station in orbit around Mars, and a Gerard K. O’Neill style big cylindrical habitat (or more than one) had already been built in relative proximity to the Earth years earlier.
To speed things along, the cloud cover on the Earth has started to rain out, and the surface is observed to be Arctic-like, i.e. brown or ice. Some have decided to return to the Earth, and probably the movie would end on a cliffhanger where the first recolonizers are confronted by some kind of group of violent survivors.