(Stuck with humans, government officials consider surfers as possible astronauts-or even stock car racers, "who have their own helmets.")Yeager, who felt they were riding, not flying, the capsules, called them "Spam in a can," and in a famous scene the astronauts argue for a porthole even though the designers argue they have no need to see anything during their brief rides into space-no reason to do anything but sit tight.īut then John Glenn ( Ed Harris) used his piloting skills to find the exact angle of entry and save a Mercury capsule from incinerating-something no monkey could have done-and later the desperate improvisations of the Apollo 13 crew saved that mission and their lives, inspiring Ron Howard's 1995 movie. The original astronauts labored under no similar handicap they were heroes to Life magazine, but knew Werner von Braun and the German scientists behind the first launches would have preferred to have monkeys in the capsules. More likely, even then, audiences were not ready for a movie that approached the program with skepticism, comedy and irony. Some blamed confusion in the public mind between the movie and John Glenn's run for public office.
Yet the movie was a puzzling flop at the box office. When the Kaufman film was released in 1983, it was hailed as one of the great American films, capturing the spirit and reflecting the reporting of Tom Wolfe's 1979 book about the early days of the space program-a book that argued that Yeager ( Sam Shepard) was so influential that his manner of speech was unconsciously echoed by commercial airline pilots while making announcements from the cockpit. "You need coverage." The Mercury program has to compete for funding with other budget items, and as the astronauts tell one another "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." "You need more than speed records in this day and age," a program publicist explains. Johnson fumes in his car when John Glenn's wife Annie, a shy stutterer, won't let him into her house along with the network crews. The first seven "astronauts" are introduced along with their wives and families, and Henry Luce writes a $500,000 check to buy their exclusive stories for his Life magazine.
National security." Before long everyone is elbowing into the spotlight. Reporters at one of the early flights of the Bell X-1 rocket plane are told "No press! Those are orders. It is also the story of two kinds of courage, both rare, and of the way the "race for space" was transformed from a secret military program into a public relations triumph. Seen now in the shadow of the Challenger and Columbia disasters, "The Right Stuff" is a grim reminder of the cost of sending humans into space.
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