Classic Film: The Right Stuff (1983)

★★★★★

Because I was born after the space race was over, I take for granted that remarkable engineering advance as a given – just as I do planes and cars. Space programs, in the way the space race took place, seems left to the machinations of the extremely rich. It’s hard to comprehend what it would have been like to live through the space race, especially if I were American or Russian. The notion of militaristic domination of space has thankfully been abandoned, and with it the funding for doing the miraculous in space.

The Right Stuff is a period drama that chronicles that early period of the space race, largely through the eyes of the pilots chosen to be the first people in space. It starts with Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and the slew of hotshot wannabes that he inspired. While Yeager and a few others kept pushing the limits of how fast a human could go in a plane, the Soviets successfully put a satellite into space, prompting the United States to launch a space program of their own. Some of America’s greatest flyboys are chosen to be the faces of this mission and go into training to be the first Americans in space.

With the space race a proxy for the militaristic ambitions of the two then-superpowers, advances in Soviet technology serve to establish an urgency for the unfolding events. Between the use of historical footage and recreations of it, The Right Stuff grounds itself in history – even if some of it is a matter of dramatic licence. These pace the film, and for a film with a runtime over 3 hours, it is paced remarkably well. It starts to drag a little as the Mercury missions wraps up, but other than that the long runtime is justified.

There’s an undercurrent of cynicism – from the pilots being a superfluous addition to a rocket, to the pilots being used as a glorified marketing tool to justify the expense to the American people – but the film never devolves into a cynical exercise. The music is tense when the pilots are in danger and triumphant when they succeed. The spaceships are effectively autonomous such that a chimpanzee can pilot it, but only a pilot knows the stakes of what happens if it goes wrong and goes anyway. Their heroism is being willing to do something that could very well kill them for the sake of the country’s morale, and that’s nothing to sneer at.

The main challenge of going into space, much like breaking the sound barrier, is an engineering one. The only engineers that appear in this film are ex-German buffoons who can’t see the human side of the equation. While the engineers made this happen, it’s the pilots who put their lives on the line by strapping themselves into these death traps, and this is their story. So many shots are from the pilot’s perspectives, or focused on their faces while they try to go beyond what people had done before. Those moments are tense and thrilling. What makes it so effective, however, is that the film takes time to show the strain their careers put on their families. The bravado and heroism contrast with the moments of vulnerability and the ever-looming spectre of death. The wall of pilots at the airbase bar is a reminder of all those who died in the pursuit of glory.

The legacy of the space race to me is one of the more noble aspirations of our species. While getting things into space is expensive and doesn’t attract the amount of government funding that programs to rain death upon the enemy do, government funded space programs are now scientific in nature. NASA announcing they’ve detected water on Mars stands out as one of those moments of awe at what our species can do, just as seeing those images from the Hubble telescope of the early universe is. The space race may have been driven by militaristic anxieties, but what it achieved is awe-inspiring.

If you liked The Right Stuff, try: Hidden Figures, Oppenheimer, First Man