Strange that some 311 castaways (less as the series went on) could maintain a force of 20-30 Eagles without a strong industrial base while losing a number people on various planetary exploration missions or encounters with monster suited aliens. By my count, the Alphans crashed/destroyed over 20+ Eagles over the span of two seasons. I actually went through my Space 1999 DVDs (on fast forward) to get a rough count of the numbers blown up or crashed in every episode. One of the things that bothered me as a kid was the number of Eagles the intrepid reluctant explorers of Moonbase Alpha had. Unlike the rest of the show, the Eagle seems like it was designed in a logical and functional manner with a command module, service module which consisted of the frame and four nuclear fusion engines which one could attach a number of different pods to be carried including the following pods: passenger, survey, science, rescue, combat, freighter and cargo. The main attraction for my inner five year old was the spaceships especially the Eagle. The latter explosion was enough to send the moon flying out of the Earth's orbit and onto its highly unlikely and improbable journey into deep space. physicist eye roll/) This “radiation” caused the nuclear waste in Area One and then Area Two to explode. In the Space 1999 timeline (September of 1999, naturally) workers and astronauts were dying because of an unknown radiation (later called magnetic radiation. Alpha was the hub of human space exploration as well as the control site for the most dangerous and toxic garbage dumps in human history which were known as Nuclear Disposal Area One and the much larger Nuclear Disposal Area Two aka Area One and Area Two. The show was based on the (some might consider delusional and others would say hopeful) premise that mankind poured resources into space exploration and not weapons (or dealing with man made financial disasters for that matter) during the 1980s and 1990s culminating with the construction of Moonbase Alpha. Despite that it is also one of the premier shows for actual physical special effects and SF model making thanks to SFX giants like Brian Johnson and Nick Allder.
It is a very guilty and stupid pleasure, long considered one of the worst SF TV shows of all time because of its butchery of science and logic.
I profess that awful and/or cheesy British science fiction occupies a special place in my heart, top among them Space 1999.