Today, man, with his intelligence and reason, has suddenly come to the crossroads. Some believe that the guided missile and electronically controlled space vehicles are the ultimate answers to spaceflight. The recent orbital and suborbital achievements have been spectacular and extremely important. However, man will never be satisfied in the undignified position of sitting in a nosecone, acting as a biomedical specimen.
—Jimmy Stewart, X-15 (1961; Santa Monica, CA:
MGM Home Entertainment, 2004)
At the beginning of the 1961 feature film X-15, a dire-sounding Jimmy Stewart, Air Force brigadier general and movie star, insists that only one kind of man should venture into space: a pilot. The space capsules, the Soviet Vostok and the American Mercury, then being launched into space would be fine for now, Stewart declares, but men were meant to reach the stars in other ways. In the wake of the first real spaceflights, X-15 boldly declares that America’s future in space will lie in craft flown by aviators, continuing a proud tradition of piloted flight that began in 1903.
X-15 is a space movie that fails as entertainment but excels as a historical document. Produced with the support of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Air Force, and North American Aviation (the contractor producing the actual experimental rocket plane of the film’s title), X-15 mixes narrative tropes with an explicit message—that the only craft with which the United States should explore space are those flown pilots. The technical advisor for X-15 was none other than test pilot Milton “Milt” Thompson, who was slated to fly an even more radical Air Force spacecraft than the X-15, the X-20 Dyna-Soar (Figure 1).1 Thompson (along with test pilot Neil Armstrong) had earlier tried to prove that humans could control a launch vehicle manually from liftoff through orbit.2 The X-15 and its successor, the orbital X-20, would not become America’s principal vehicles for exploring space, but pilots already were, and remained for years, the principal individuals who would go there (Figure 2).
FIGURE 1. Astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom and test pilot Milton “Milt” Thompson stand near the Paresev 1-A at NASA’s Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in 1962. The Paresev evaluated a potential piloted return capability for NASA’s Project Gemini spacecraft. Courtesy of NASA.
In their fifty years of professional existence, American astronauts have assumed a variety of popular roles: courageous soldier, intrepid explorer, chaste but alluring sex symbol.3 Of all of the public images of the American astronaut, however, none has proven more enduring than that of the astronaut as aviator. In the decades prior to the beginning of the space age, science fiction placed a variety of characters into space, including women, elderly physicists, children, and household pets. In 1959, however, NASA’s new all-male, all-military, all-pilot astronaut corps inspired a new conception of the space traveler: not mad scientist or swashbuckler, but stalwart stick-and-rudder man. Inspired by the popular image of heroic combat pilots, these taciturn, technically adept flyers were as unfazed by the specter of death as they were obsessed with accomplishing their mission.
FIGURE 2. NASA test pilot and future astronaut Neil Armstrong stands beside X-15 #1 after a research flight. Courtesy of USAF/NASA.
The astronauts’ real-life accomplishments beginning in 1961 not only inspired and validated this public image but pushed other kinds of potential space travelers—astronomers, engineers, physicians—out of the public imagination. Compared to the nation’s pilots, America’s scientists seemed particularly unfit for space exploration. Rather than inaugurating a wave of popular culture about average people living and working in space, the flights of the space shuttle beginning in 1981 inspired popular culture that reinforced the allure of the space pilot, increasingly defined not as an emotionless “systems man” but as a gruff and grizzled aviator able to steer complex machines with the nudge of a control stick. This retrograde image suited the American public, which saw in it a romanticized version of NASA’s spaceflight achievements and the nation’s proud legacy of individualism and heroic exploration.4
Spaceflight before Space Pilots
The image of the astronaut as pilot has become so entrenched in the mythology of spaceflight that it may be difficult for one to imagine an era in which some of America’s brightest minds doubted whether pilots would be required at all for this endeavor. Although winged spacecraft figured prominently in 1950s concept drawings for spacecraft, in both the technical literature and the popular fiction of the era, the role of the aviator in spaceflight was often secondary to that of engineers and scientists. Although many concepts for future spacecraft created by spaceflight pioneer Wernher von Braun and other visionaries involved space planes and other piloted craft, others, including the craft depicted in the 1950 film Destination Moon and another designed by von Braun and Willy Ley, described mostly automated spaceships that required little hands-on piloting.5 Although a token military aviator or navigator (or naval officer in earlier works) was commonplace aboard fictional spacecraft of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, crews consisting solely of such men were not. Cinematic and television space crews required astronomers to make discoveries and engineers to keep the craft in working order, as well as colorful, clashing personalities to ensure drama.
Popular interpretations placed the fictional spaceship and its crew within the narrative conventions of the midcentury American Western, or “horse opera.” In the same way that frontier towns might feature everyone from sheriffs to schoolmarms, “space operas” recreated complex extraterrestrial communities filled with grotesque characters. The eclectic space travelers of movies like Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M (1950), and Conquest of Space (1955) and television’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949), Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (1950), and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954) were distinguished less by their piloting skills than by their resemblance to stock film and television characters: heroes and heroines, villains, damsels in distress, and comedic foils of various stripes.6 In such films, the addition of a female chemist (Rocketship X-M) provided much needed sexual tension, a child acted as an audience surrogate to whom plot points could be explained (Rocky Jones), and an elderly professor represented a know-it-all to provide exposition and technical explanations (Rocky Jones again).7 Like typical war movies of the mid-twentieth century, space films like Rocketship X-M and Conquest of Space enlivened their plot (a voyage to Mars) with multiethnic crews of technicians whose personal characteristics—accents, excitability, selfishness—provide broad humor.8
The enormous spacecraft of these fictional works, however, bore little resemblance to the actual craft Americans were preparing to fly into space in the 1950s: vehicles so small that they would likely accommodate only a single, highly trained occupant. Who that individual should be was a question that attracted substantial Air Force interest long before NASA’s creation in 1958. By that time, America’s test pilots were already edging toward space above the dry lake beds of Edwards Air Force Base, California, where, for fifteen years, aviators flying under the auspices of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had “wrung out” a series of experimental jet- and rocket-powered aircraft intended to push the known limits of speed and altitude.9 Achieving orbital flight through incremental improvement of traditional flight technologies suited the Air Force and its pilots, and it did not stretch the imagination much to suggest that in a few short years, vehicles flown by these men would conquer space (Figure 3).
FIGURE 3. The Bell Aircraft and the Martin Company joined to create this proposal for the Air Force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar program, which is representative of the innovative piloted spacecraft concepts developed during the late 1950s. Piloted craft like these represented the astronauts’ preferred means of accessing space. Courtesy of the Glenn L. Martin Maryland Aviation Museum.
That humans would explore space in a winged craft, however, was not a foregone conclusion. In 1957, a ballistic missile hurled a Soviet probe the size of beach ball into Earth orbit. The Americans moved quickly to match this feat, and by 1959, a heated competition was already underway to launch a rudimentary piloted capsule into Earth orbit using technologies already available. These craft would dispense with wings altogether, consisting only of a spherical or conical capsule launched atop a converted intercontinental ballistic missile and guided into space and back by radio and computers instead of a pilot’s skilled hands. Aviators were not obvious candidates to crew such vehicles.
In late 1958, NASA’s Space Task Group undertook a brief civil service recruitment effort that, if not cancelled weeks later, would have led to the hiring of technical and scientific specialists as America’s first astronauts.10 Instead, NASA, at the insistence of President Eisenhower, drew its first seven astronauts from the all-male ranks of its military test pilots. NASA did not need actual pilots to fly its Project Mercury capsules, but it wanted the reliability and discretion military test pilots could provide. America’s would-be astronauts wanted the opportunity to be the first Americans in space, but not at the expense of their professional identity. Once the astronauts arrived, they made sure that NASA, the press, and the American public knew that they would always be military aviators, first and foremost.
Birth of the Space Aviator
Despite efforts by elite government image makers to define for the American public what scientific goals spaceflight would accomplish, the public ultimately proved a challenging target for manipulation. The earliest NASA promotions of its new astronauts (including NASA-sanctioned spreads in Life magazine) depicted them in suits and ties, but the public favored a slightly more militant image and tended to view the space race as what Lewis Mumford disparagingly called a “symbolic act of war.”11 Within NASA’s astronaut corps, a military piloting culture quickly took root and bled into the public sphere through press reports about the men. Under the astronauts’ influence, NASA’s space “capsules” became “spacecraft,” crewed only by “pilots.”12 (As Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins later explained, “capsules are swallowed.”)13 Members of NASA’s Space Task Group considered “space pilot” among the terms for the new professional group, ultimately modifying the word “aeronaut” to create what they thought was a neologism.14 Even after NASA introduced the word “astronaut” to popular parlance, journalists continued to use the more specific space pilot, with its connotations of a defined professional skill set.15
The American public, soon instructed by President Kennedy that the exploration of space implicated the survival of the free world,16 seized upon astronauts as pilot-warriors, risking their lives in a grand international contest.17 Depictions in print fiction, film, and television emphasized astronauts’ stolid military bearing and a stoic acceptance of danger common to popular depictions of military aviators. World War II, having ended only fifteen years earlier, provided not only the pilots who made space exploration possible (including NASA astronauts John Glenn Jr. and Donald “Deke” Slayton and the first X-15 pilot awarded “astronaut wings,” Air Force Major Robert White) but also a literary vocabulary with which to describe men willing to endure such risks.18
The emotionless, crew-cut space pilots of television’s Men into Space (1959–60) and The Twilight Zone (1959–64) and earnest films like X-15 (1961) are recognizable caricatures, not of fictional adventurers of 1950s space movies, but of the kinds of taciturn pilots with which American audiences had become familiar thanks to a steady postwar diet of combat films. Spaceflight for these unflappable aviators is less an adventure than a solemn duty and one likely to require great sacrifice. Astronauts need not fear death, however, because they, like the bomber pilots Gregory Peck’s character commands in the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High, are “already dead”: engaged in too perilous a pursuit to even contemplate surviving.19 Indeed, most noteworthy of the fictional, near-future Air Force astronaut Colonel Edward McCauley (played by William Lundigan) of Men into Space is his utter absence of emotion when he negotiates the life-threatening crises that seem to occur in each week’s space voyage.20
Characters ignoring their own mortality were a fixture of Rod Serling’s innovative television series The Twilight Zone. A combat veteran strongly influenced by his experiences in the Philippines during World War II, Serling wrote or produced dozens of scripts featuring military men who heroically resist an inevitable death. Not surprisingly, Twilight Zone featured some of the most thoughtful investigations of the astronaut psyche, finding it somewhat akin to that of a war-hardened rifleman. The lonely, mournful men packed away in Serling’s spaceships are literally not long for this world. Although death is an ever-present menace, alienation is their worst enemy: spaceflight brings a separation from loved ones, human society, familiar places, and the expectations of a full, happy life. On distant planets and asteroids, astronauts can expect not warm welcomes, but privation, murder, and imprisonment at the hands of aliens.21 In a 1959 episode entitled “And When the Sky Was Opened,” the three astronauts who return to Earth after flying their X-20 feel so alienated from society that they slowly disappear, consumed by the sense that they no longer belong on Earth.22 Like veterans grappling with the aftereffects of wartime service, Serling’s spacemen have no place in the world they left behind.
Serling’s astronauts—almost all of them pilots—are stubborn, practical men. Their missions require not so much a skilled hand (which they are presumed to possess) but an ability, supposedly unique to aviators, to endure stress while preserving their composure. Twilight Zone spacemen encounter parallel universes, nuclear wars, and worse: the astronauts in 1963’s “Death Ship” soldier on in the face of incontrovertible evidence (including hallucinations of deceased loved ones and the sight of their own corpses) that they are already dead.23 The script by Richard Matheson (based upon an earlier novelette) ended with Serling’s narration distilling the psyche of the episode’s astronaut hero, “a man of such indomitable will that even the two men beneath his command are not allowed, by him, to see the truth … that they are no longer among the living.”24 It was precisely this kind of self-control, rather than raw piloting ability, that NASA noted with favor in its real-life space crews. “Central in their personalities,” NASA psychiatrists wrote of America’s first astronauts, was a “striking resilience in the face of frustration.”25
It is this resilience, an almost maniacal devotion to exploration in the face of extreme danger, that emerges most clearly from the 1961 film X-15. A lazy, turgid melodrama about three pilots preparing to fly North American Aviation’s rocket plane into space, it lumbers along despite the direction of Richard Donner and appearances by Mary Tyler Moore and Charles Bronson, who labor in a film so padded with stock footage that it could be mistaken for a documentary.26 Bronson plays a test pilot anxiously awaiting the first record-breaking flights of the sleek black rocket aircraft: a craft billed in the film as simultaneously revolutionary, dangerous, and necessary. Amid predictable plotlines of love, worry, and almost senseless death, Bronson and company must harness the craft’s power and confront its danger, seldom asking whether the effort is worth the trouble.
Nor does the film ever ask whether the men who have been chosen for this special destiny are the right men for the job. The X-15 flies like an airplane and thus requires pilots, but the less expensive and more reliable capsules do not. The X-15 will reach space, the film promises, but to what end, other than destiny? It is a poor platform for research in any field other than flight test engineering. Visions of spaceflight popular a decade early provided a richer context for space travel, replete with exotic worlds to be charted and surveyed. By such a measure, a space program staffed only with pilots appeared a poor force to engage in such investigations. Yet efforts by NASA to add professional scientists to its astronaut ranks would prove problematic, as popular culture built around the courageous exploits of pilots found little enthusiasm for new kinds of space travelers.
Pilots or Professors?
Ungainly, with thick-framed eyeglasses and a vaguely worried expression, the spacesuit-clad character who graces the dust jacket of astronomer Brian O’Leary’s 1970 memoir The Making of an Ex-Astronaut bears a striking resemblance to another icon of the early 1970s: film director Woody Allen. Stuffing his head into a fishbowl helmet, O’Leary appears as out of place in his own skin as Allen’s later character Miles Monroe, the New York City health food store proprietor in Sleeper (1973) who, in one scene, dons an ill-fitting space suit after his frozen body is thawed out 200 years into the future. Although O’Leary’s text describes a poised, courageous scientist and athletic family man selected in 1967 to join the elite ranks of America’s astronaut corps, it is the image of the awkward, hapless “scientist-astronaut,” so unsuited to spaceflight as to be an embarrassment to his nation, that flourished in both high and low culture of the period.
Although NASA tried to sell to America, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of mature, clean-cut family men as pilots for its space vehicles, the public saw them as taciturn military pilots. NASA’s efforts to add civilian scientists to the flight roster beginning in 1965 met with only modest success and never galvanized public enthusiasm.27 Popular culture lampooned space scientists as oddballs, and NASA’s scientist-astronauts received a cool welcome from their pilot-astronaut colleagues. This powerful group, containing some of the most elite engineers America had ever assembled, in particular reveled in its piloting pedigree, its pedestrian sensibilities, and its supposed lack of cultural sophistication.
From the earliest days of America’s first human spaceflight program, Project Mercury, NASA’s astronauts leveraged their public visibility to ensure their dominance over scientists who threatened their monopoly over spaceflight. Despite their success in World War II developing the atomic bomb and microwave radar (or perhaps because of it) images of the scientist in postwar America were dominated by caricatures of oddballs engaged in seemingly magical work incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In an era of astonishing scientific advance and unprecedented funding for research,28 movies about miraculous scientific discoveries like The Absent Minded Professor (1961), Son of Flubber (1963), and The Nutty Professor (1963) resonated with a public that appreciated the value of science but found it, and its practitioners, as opaque as ever.29
During the 1960s, rocketry increasingly resembled a large research program in which teams of engineers designed craft flown by aviators who often resented the scientists’ and engineers’ efforts.30 As trained test pilots, astronauts feared becoming mere passengers in vehicles designed for monkeys. (In 1957’s Curious George Gets a Medal, a team of balding, paunchy, pipe-smoking, bow-tie-wearing, white-coated eggheads from the Museum of Science put the finishing touches on the fearless monkey’s rocket right before his flight.)31 Although not pilots themselves, space scientists convincingly claimed expertise in spaceflight and, to the astronauts, cluttered flight plans with “Larry Lightbulb experiments” that fascinated scientists at the expense of crew safety.32
To support the growing needs of the space program, NASA selected new groups of astronauts roughly every other year, typically choosing from a thousand or more highly qualified military pilots for a dozen or so spots. Deke Slayton and the first American in space, Alan Shepard Jr., test pilots selected as astronauts in 1959 but grounded medically in 1962 and 1964, respectively, assumed principal responsibility for assigning these astronauts to missions and enforcing the piloting ethos. By the mid-1960s, astronaut meetings were called pilot meetings, and the Astronaut Office ensured that every member of every American space crew bore the commander or pilot designation, whether they had substantial piloting responsibilities on the craft or not.33 It was into this often unfriendly climate that NASA’s scientist-astronauts were thrown.
Under pressure from the scientific community to fulfill its research objectives and broaden its astronaut ranks to civilian experts, NASA, beginning in 1965, selected the first professional scientists to join the astronaut corps. In response to its first solicitation for qualified candidates, NASA received nearly 1,500 applications, but few applicants possessed the right combination of qualifications, and only six astronauts were approved, half the number needed. Vetted by the National Academy of Sciences, most had little flying experience but would be taught to fly as part of their NASA training. A selection in 1967, intended to produce researchers to support future long-duration Earth orbital and lunar flights, relaxed the application requirements and yielded eleven new scientist-astronauts with specialties ranging from astronomy to physiology.34 Their diverse range of scientific talents, however, did little to endear the men to the public, NASA experts, or their astronaut peers.35
Skepticism about the scientists extended most ardently to the pilot-astronauts already clogging the flight roster; their criticisms, sometimes half-formed and simpleminded, reeked of popular prejudices against intellectuals whose work the pilots neither respected nor understood. Until 1965, all astronauts had been active or former military personnel, and although all of the first astronauts had undergraduate training in science or engineering, many, like Slayton and Virgil “Gus” Grissom, were “small-town boys.”36 To these salt-of-the-Earth veterans, the new MDs and PhDs were soft, weak, straight out of college, and unaccustomed to making life-or-death decisions. Astronauts who regularly teased each other by mercilessly impugning each other’s flying abilities singled out the new scientist-astronauts for this kind of hazing as a group. “We quickly decided that the new breed was inferior,” later wrote astronaut Walter Cunningham, summarizing the opinions of his colleagues.37
The presence of so many scientists in the flight rotation was unnerving to the pilots precisely because it threatened both their monopoly on space travel and their public profile. NASA’s mandate to expand “human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space” made scientist-astronauts the future of the human spaceflight program, and the pilots knew it.38 Noted Cunningham, “scientist-astronauts were brought into the program as far back as 1965. It was clear even then that they would outnumber the aviators some time in the future … [We] worried that Congress and the public might not know the difference, or even care.” Worse, the public shared the astronauts’ prejudices against scientists, and so their arrival undermined the Astronaut Office’s veneer of elite skill. The presence of “milquetoast academic types” in the program suggested that many more people could be astronauts than actually were.39
Of the scientist-astronauts NASA selected in 1965 and 1967, only Harrison “Jack” Schmitt flew on an Apollo lunar mission and then only after the cancellation of later Apollo flights led NASA’s chief scientist, Homer Newell, and the National Academy of Sciences to force Slayton to fly Schmitt on Apollo 17.40 Geologist Schmitt, a member of the 1965 Group, was an obvious choice for a seat on a lunar landing mission, but Slayton was initially unmoved, noting that a “dead geologist” would be of “no use to anyone.”41 Although respected for his hard work in supporting other Apollo missions, Schmitt fell behind in jet pilot training and became a punch line.42 “If God had meant man to fly,” other astronauts joked, “it wouldn’t have been Jack Schmitt.”43 Further galling NASA’s pilot-astronauts, Schmitt’s seat came at the expense of Joseph “Joe” Engle, a former X-15 test pilot known to his colleagues as “a terrific stick and rudder guy.”44
To a public inclined to lionize astronauts as flying warriors, the response to the prospect of scientists sharing space vehicles with test pilots was tepid. In American film and television of the period, astronauts came in only two forms: heroic aviators and hapless stowaways.45 As crewmembers on any kind of vessel, scientists had long been regarded as unwelcome guests, apt to suffer from physical weakness and odd preoccupations. In maritime culture (from which many astronauts emerged), scientists, who consumed ships’ stores and burdened ships’ crews with experiments but could not stand watch, were an annoyance and a hazard. “In the tradition of naval service,” Helen Rozwadowski writes of efforts to integrate naturalists into nineteenth century naval operations, “a philosopher afloat used to be considered as unlucky as a cat or a corpse.”46 Likewise, in popular culture of the mid-1960s, the scientist aboard a space vehicle was invariably a helpless, inscrutable figure not to be trusted with the heroic work of spaceflight.
The “reluctant” or unqualified astronaut—often a scientist—was a particularly common motif in film and television of the period; in these depictions, scientists were either literally alien (like Star Trek’s extraterrestrial Mr. Spock), robotic, or merely creepy.47 The scientists in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are fungible, expendable nonentities who spend the film in hibernation, individually wrapped like bags of frozen peas.48 This portrait is relatively benign; in other films, scientists are traitors. In Fantastic Voyage (1966), a craft is miniaturized by a shrink ray to travel not into outer space but through the human body to save a dying man from a blood clot. A member of the vessel’s scientific crew, however, is a murderous spy and saboteur.49
As Apollo’s influence waned in the mid-1970s, skewed images of villainous space scientists remained as popular as ever, surfacing in the larger stew of cynicism about government, organized science, and big business. George’s Lucas’s influential 1977 blockbuster Star Wars celebrated the exploits of an untutored farm boy who, at the urging of a robed cleric, destroys a government-owned space weapon emblematic of “big science” itself.50 In director Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a corporately owned deep space vessel’s lone scientist is a sinister android in disguise, secretly programmed by the home office to recover a dangerous space monster and kill any crewmember who gets in his way.51 The qualities that made scientists who they were, arcane knowledge, a lack of transparency about their work, and loyalty to questionable goals or ideals, continued to make them suspect.
Noteworthy about public skepticism for scientists in space was the degree to which these concerns came to be shared by educated elites. Some scientists had questioned human spaceflight’s aims almost immediately upon its inception,52 but the scientist-astronaut program broadened public skepticism.53 Critics asserted that although manned space vehicles produced a wealth of scientific data, the programs that launched them were seldom motivated by the explicit needs of the scientific community; the space program was, to its critics, a “mission looking for a science” rather than “science looking for a mission.”54 To those within the scientific community inclined to favor robotic exploration over manned spaceflight, it was no more clear that scientists should fly in space than test pilots. Even NASA’s examining psychiatrists were confused by the prospect of scientist-astronauts. The psychiatrists could not figure out why a scientist would want to fly in space, and although they asked the candidates about their motivations, the psychiatrists were not sure which responses would be pathological.55
The Space Shuttle and the Pilot Renaissance
During America’s first decade in orbit, the public face of human space exploration belonged to taciturn test pilots with little patience for Larry Lightbulb types. In 1965, however, only a few years after the first humans ventured into space, NASA grudgingly opened its astronaut ranks to academic scientists. Although many hoped that these new “science pilots” would restore NASA’s reputation and return science to the forefront of human spaceflight, with each passing year they seemed a tougher sell to the American people and to fellow astronauts. Ultimately faced with declining public interest in human spaceflight during the 1970s and 1980s, NASA management increasingly embraced popular culture’s celebration not of scientists but of the common man, refashioning the human spaceflight program to build support for its efforts, with mixed success. Instead, audiences gravitated to fanciful imaginings of America’s first space heroes: tough, anachronistic pilots for whom spaceflight remained a daring adventure.
As the next step in fixed-wing flight, America’s space shuttle was, to many of its supporters, to be the culmination of an aeronautical engineering tradition dating back to the Wright brothers.56 Announced by President Richard Nixon and NASA Administrator James Fletcher on January 5, 1972, the shuttle orbiters would be winged space planes the size of a small jet airliner, larger than previous space vehicles and better able to accommodate diverse activities undertaken by nontraditional crew members. Although two pilots would still be required to fly it, the shuttle could accommodate a predominantly nonpilot crew of scientists (as many as six per flight) freed from flying responsibilities and able to devote themselves fully to scientific and other pursuits (Figure 4). In fact, the relative comfort and sophistication of the Shuttle created an opportunity for relatively untrained personnel to fly in space, a fact that NASA exploited when flights of the vehicles began in 1981. NASA, struggling to galvanize enthusiasm for its new “space truck,” would celebrate the shuttle as a place where everyday people, not scientists, could ride in space as “observers.”57 (One 1986 film, SpaceCamp, even suggested, seemingly with NASA’s endorsement, that the shuttle could be flown tolerably well by children.)58
FIGURE 4. Demonstrating the importance of pilots in the Space Shuttle Program, Commander Fred Haise and Pilot C. Gordon Fullerton pose with the orbiter Enterprise at the Rockwell International Space Division’s Orbiter Assembly Facility in Palmdale, California, in advance of the first Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests in 1977. Courtesy of NASA.
NASA ultimately attempted to utilize this unique capability in a formal project to recruit nonprofessional crewmembers, the Spaceflight Participant Program, hoping, as NASA Administrator James Beggs described, that “artists” and other “professional communicators” flying aboard the space shuttle, even if assigned to do no more than “tend the galley,” would help the agency connect once again to a bored public.59 NASA also raised the specter of new problems: shortly before SpaceCamp opened in theaters, an explosion during the launch of the Challenger claimed the lives of its crew, including the first private citizen chosen to fly in it, school teacher Christa McAuliffe. True space tourism, first promised in the early 1980s, would not emerge for another twenty years.
The smaller number of astronauts who would actually pilot shuttle orbiters filled with scientists and tourists, however, emerged from this period with their reputations intact, even improved. For them, the skills required to operate the new winged craft were even more directly analogous to those of traditional aviators, and although shuttle passengers were a tough sell in popular culture, shuttle pilot-astronauts appeared in film and television even before the shuttle first flew. The heroine of the 1979 James Bond film Moonraker is a sultry space shuttle pilot, and Bond himself takes control of the craft in the movie’s thrilling finale.60 The television iteration of the classic Buck Rogers character from American film serials of the 1930s replaced the futuristic space voyager with a space shuttle pilot-astronaut, accidentally frozen and revived 500 years in the future. Once restored to health, Gil Gerard’s character in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979–81) finds his piloting skills to be transferable, and he seamlessly transitions into Earth’s future space force, even instructing its unskilled pilots in twentieth century air combat tactics.61
The idea of the ancient aviator thawed out and relevant once again was a timely one in 1979. The tenth anniversary the first Apollo lunar landing encouraged a period of reexamination of the early years of America’s space program and burnished the reputations of NASA’s legendary pilot-astronauts. Former astronauts like Walter Cunningham had made the first forays into tell-all astronaut biography, but a “civilian” writer, Tom Wolfe, produced the most potent work on America’s first spacemen, The Right Stuff (1979). In his often searing passages, Wolfe found a voice for a traditionally taciturn community of gruff aviators who, in Wolfe’s estimation, had bucked NASA’s dehumanizing organizational culture to establish the role of the pilot in the American space program. The 1983 film adaptation of the book not only recast America’s first astronauts as antiheroes but rewrote the early history of American spaceflight to emphasize continuities with X-plane research of the 1940s and 1950s. Gone were the studious moments where the astronaut created a managerial identity rooted in sound engineering practice: the Original Seven astronauts of Project Mercury in the film are, instead, womanizing cowboys who must battle a cabal of heartless German-born rocket scientists (obviously intended to be von Braun and his associates, but not identified in the film) for the soul of NASA. The one question that hovers over the men is not “Why am I here?” but “Who’s the best pilot you ever saw?”62
In space films of the 1960s, the chief asset pilots bring to their space vehicles is not a set of flying skills but a calm demeanor when confronting life-threatening situations. Astronauts personified, Howard McCurdy explains, technical perfection and unflinching competence, representative of the space program as a whole.63 This tone matched the popular understanding of NASA’s real spacecraft: dangerous machines that offered relatively few opportunities for traditional piloting. Space movies of the 1980s and 1990s, however, paradoxically celebrated a more traditional kind of aviator: the grizzled flyboy whose basic flying skills save crew, craft, and mission. The space shuttle inspired and enabled such characterizations: in 1981, two flights of the orbiter Columbia by all-test-pilot crews (including veteran X-15 pilot Joe Engle in the left seat) demonstrated the continued importance of aviators to NASA’s human spaceflight program (Figure 5).
A common trope of these later space films is the single moment, amid a confusion of often failing technologies, when, as in the fact-based Apollo 13 (1995) and the fictional but seemingly realistic Deep Impact (1998) and Space Cowboys (2000), a pilot’s brief handling of a control stick stewards a spacecraft through a moment of extreme peril. The space shuttle’s airplane-like design encouraged these plots, but writers employed the same device in films about historical spacecraft and exotic future vehicles. These moments serve many functions in these films. At the most basic level, they provide audiences with an easy-to-understand conception of the astronaut’s job, one that, although inaccurate, relates to the audience’s personal experience.
The circumstances requiring manual piloting in these films are greatly simplified and correspond to video game challenges easily replicated on personal computers or console devices then commonplace in American life. (Indeed, anyone who has ever tapped a joystick or game pad is apt to think “I can do that.”) In Apollo 13, an account of the real-life aborted 1970 lunar flight, astronaut James “Jim” Lovell (Tom Hanks) must keep his ungainly craft straight as an engine is fired for its perilous return to Earth.64 In the disaster fantasy Deep Impact, fictional Apollo veteran Spurgeon Tanner (Robert Duvall) must set his craft down upon a comet, and in the adventure Space Cowboys, over-the-hill test pilot Frank Corvin (Clint Eastwood) must land his damaged orbiter—maneuvers that require these characters to handle conventional flight controls while conjuring traditional piloting skills supposedly lost among the younger generation.65
FIGURE 5. Commander John Young and Pilot Robert Crippen sit on the flight deck of the orbiter Columbia in 1980, in preparation for the spacecraft’s first flight the following year. The space shuttle offered astronauts a vehicle with airplane-style controls and a design similar to that of space plane concepts of the 1950s. Courtesy of NASA.
These exploits validate the concept of human spaceflight generally, as these moments of flying skill usually follow mechanical failures that render automated systems useless. In particular, they serve to validate the inclusion of traditionally trained pilot-astronauts in space crews, as opposed to younger scientists or other specialists lacking such skills. Purposefully (as in Space Cowboys) or inadvertently (as in SpaceCamp), these situations reinforce the concept that the traditionally recruited and trained astronauts possess better skills than newer ones. Space Cowboys fictionalizes John Glenn’s 1998 shuttle flight, at the age of 77, by assembling a shuttle crew composed largely of aged leading men Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland. Needless to say, they resolve the film’s major crises after younger astronauts are all but incapacitated. In SpaceCamp, a graying Tom Skerritt plays fictional veteran NASA astronaut Zach Bergstrom, whose benevolent presence on the ground hovers over a group the teenage tourists accidentally shot into space after a computer failure.
Finally, in these films, an early demonstration of flying skill establishes a single character as an unambiguous hero figure: an independent-minded aviator who, through skill and sacrifice, becomes personally responsible for the safety of others. Amid the large casts of seemingly identical characters, the protagonist with a gift for flying is a breed apart and a figure worthy of the audience’s continued attention. The Right Stuff begins by lionizing test pilot Chuck Yeager’s (Sam Shepard) breaking of the sound barrier in 1947 and ends, cryptically, when Original Seven astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. (Dennis Quaid) hints in 1962 that it was the intrepid and largely unheralded Yeager who most deserves America’s accolades. (Indeed, Yeager is nearly killed testing a new jet in the film’s last and most dramatic scene).
SpaceCamp’s teen piloting prodigy, Kathryn Fairly (Lea Thompson), literally flies into the film (aboard a biplane), and her status as a pilot ensures a leadership role for her as she and her team of campers learn to crew an orbiter. In Apollo 13, NASA astronaut Thomas Mattingly’s (Gary Sinise) skill at flying an Apollo ground simulator suggests that he will play a critical later role in the film despite being bumped from the mission. Fictional future astronaut Jim McConnell in the 2000 film Mission to Mars (Sinise again) is referred to minutes into the film as a heroic aviator who landed a crippled Block II shuttle on a previous mission. By the movie’s end, McConnell will be its undisputed emotional center as he ventures out, alone, to explore a Martian civilization.66 In Space Cowboys, Corvin saves his crew’s shuttle orbiter with a flick of the wrist demonstrated to him earlier in the film by his more capable colleague “Hawk” Hawkins (Tommy Lee Jones). Instead of piloting the shuttle home, daring test pilot Hawk will sacrifice his life to save Corvin and the rest of humanity by single-handedly piloting a malfunctioning Russian nuclear missile platform to the Moon.67
The brave aviators who triumph at the conclusion of each of these movies may or may not enjoy the adoration of the American people or the pleasures of a restful retirement. Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell and Space Cowboys’s Frank Corvin will return to Earth to loving wives and the knowledge that they did their jobs as well as could be expected. For Hawk Hawkins and Jim McConnell, however, space piloting will bring a more noble triumph and a more bittersweet reward: they will have transcended their own mortality to join the pantheon of legendary lost aviators.
Conclusion: Space Pilots in Aviation History
Even more than other large technological endeavors, the history of spaceflight demonstrates how significant popular opinion has been in establishing the goals of modern American technoscience. American human spaceflight, as Walter MacDougall chronicled in The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (1985), did not emerge in a moment of calculated calm but from a “media riot” following the Soviet launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, in 1957.68 Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, NASA recruited and publicized a force of pilots to carry America’s aspirations into space. Under President John F. Kennedy, NASA fixed upon a new goal: a voyage by an American man to the Moon, which would guarantee the nation’s global standing and, thanks to television, make heroes of the aviators who would achieved it. With American human spaceflight acutely dependent on congressional funding, voter enthusiasm proved influential in structuring America’s agenda in space.
The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps test pilots who had traveled to Washington, DC, in 1959 to interview for the position of astronaut were prepared to conceal much about themselves to get the job, but the fact they tried hardest to hide was their discomfort at trading their airplanes for seats in a nose cone bolted to a rocket. The space race of the 1960s was a political problem, not an aeronautical one, and the astronauts America needed were not perfect pilots but professional managers and public relations consultants. These men would later seek to establish their piloting bona fides with both NASA’s engineers and more established test pilots, who looked at Project Mercury with a mixture of contempt and alarm. Meanwhile, astronauts labored to make space capsules more like the airplanes they knew best. Passengers in NASA’s new space capsules would take orders; true space pilots would give them, maintaining control over their machines and their missions.
Spaceflight’s role has often been one of fulfilling a prophecy: humanity’s inevitable exploration of the heavens, often described in the most grandiose and messianic of terms. Airplane mythologies in turn celebrate a kind of American—the technically proficient, independent frontiersman—that strokes preconceptions about who Americans are as a people. If the pilots’ hold on space movies is weakening, evidence of such a transformation is sparse. Red Planet (2000) struggles to enliven the exploits of a flight engineer who battles a crazed robot on the Martian surface (yet who is still mocked as a “janitor” by the ship’s pilot-in-command).69 And the 2009 British film Moon restored the pilot-astronaut archetype in the form of lunar explorer Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), although it satirized the type as a kind of inhuman fabrication of the nation’s space program.70 Ultimately, neither NASA nor the popular culture it has inspired has been able to make a passenger in a spacecraft more exciting than its pilot.
Notes
1. “Space Pilot Lands a Wingless Vehicle in Test of Re-entry,” New York Times, July 13, 1966.
2. David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 68–73; David A. Mindell, “Human and Machine in the History of Spaceflight,” in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (Washington, DC: NASA, 2006), 153–54.
3. See, e.g., Roger D. Launius, “Heroes in a Vacuum: The Apollo Astronaut as Cultural Icon” (paper presented at the 43rd AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit, Reno, NV, January 10–13, 2005); Vivian Sobchack, “The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1990), 108.
4. This work draws, in part, on my prior research and writing on this topic. See, e.g., Matthew H. Hersch, Inventing the American Astronaut (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); “Return of the Lost Spaceman: America’s Astronauts in Popular Culture, 1959–2006,” The Journal of Popular Culture 44 (2011): 73–92; “Spacework: Labor And Culture in America’s Astronaut Corps, 1959–1979.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010.
5. See, e.g., Destination Moon, DVD, directed by Irving Pichel (1950; Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2000); Wernher von Braun, The Mars Project (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953). But see Wernher von Braun and Cornelius Ryan, Conquest of the Moon (New York: Viking Press, 1953), 36–38. “The captain of the ship, on being told by his navigator that the vehicle is off course, can make the desired change by inserting a previously prepared tape into the automatic pilot” (von Braun and Ryan, Conquest of the Moon, 48).
6. These television programs were instantly and extremely popular with young audiences. Patrick McCray, Keep Watching the Skies: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
7. Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, directed by Hollingsworth Morse (Roland Reed TV Productions, 1954). See also Frau im Mond, DVD, directed by Fritz Lang (1929; New York, NY: Kino Video, 2004), for a similar collection of stock characters.
8. Rocketship X-M, DVD, directed by Kurt Neumann (1950; Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2000); Conquest of Space, DVD, directed by Byron Haskin (1955; Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2004).
9. Roger E. Bilstein, Orders of Magnitude: A History of the NACA and NASA, 1915–1990 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1989).
10. Joseph D. Atkinson and Jay M. Shafritz, The Real Stuff: A History of NASA’s Astronaut Recruitment Program (New York: Praeger, 1985), 32–33.
11. Lewis Mumford, “No: ‘A Symbolic Act of War …,’ ” New York Times, July 21, 1969.
12. NASA Space Task Group, handwritten revisions to 12/30/1960 telex from Loudon Wainwright, Life magazine, ARC Identifier 278231, records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Archives and Records Center, College Park, MD.
13. Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys (New York: Farrar, 1974), 76.
14. Colin Burgess, Selecting the Mercury Seven: The Search for America’s First Astronauts, Springer-Praxis Books in Space Exploration (New York: Springer, 2011), 30.
15. See, e.g., “Seven Pilots Picked for Satellite Trips: 7 Chosen by U. S. as Space Pilots,” New York Times, April 7, 1959; “2 Women Seek Roles as U.S. Space Pilots,” New York Times, July 7, 1963; “Kennedy Phones Salute to Pilot: Watches Astronaut on TV,” New York Times, July 22, 1961; “Space Pilots Get Training on Jets: Future Astronaut Describes Simulated Re-entry,” New York Times, November 10, 1963.
16. John F. Kennedy, “Excerpts from ‘Urgent National Needs,’ Speech to a Joint Session of Congress, May 25, 1961,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, ed. John M. Logsdon (Washington, DC: NASA, 1995), 453.
17. Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 88–91.
18. “X-15 Test Pilot Decorated as First Winged Astronaut,” New York Times, June 4, 1963.
19. Twelve O’Clock High, DVD, directed by Henry King (1949; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002). Although Peck’s General Frank Savage eventually crumbles under the pressure, U.S. Air Force consultants insisted that his breakdown manifest in fatigue rather than awkward bursts of irrationality and emotion. Lawrence H. Suid, Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 112.
20. See Margaret A. Weitekamp’s chapter in this volume.
21. “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” The Twilight Zone, directed by Stuart Rosenberg, teleplay by Rod Serling, CBS, January 15, 1960; “Elegy,” The Twilight Zone, directed by Douglas Heyes, teleplay by Charles Beaumont, CBS, February 19, 1960; “People Are Alike All Over,” The Twilight Zone, directed by Mitchell Leisen, teleplay by Rod Serling, CBS, March 25, 1960.
22. “And When the Sky Was Opened,” The Twilight Zone, directed by Douglas Heyes, teleplay by Rod Serling, CBS, December 11, 1959.
23. “The Parallel,” The Twilight Zone, directed by Alan Crosland Jr., teleplay by Rod Serling, CBS, March 14, 1963; “Probe 7, Over and Out,” The Twilight Zone, directed by Ted Post, teleplay by Rod Serling, CBS, November 29, 1963; “Death Ship,” The Twilight Zone, directed by Don Medford, teleplay by Richard Matheson, CBS, February 7, 1963.
24. Richard Matheson, “Death Ship,” in Richard Matheson’s The Twilight Zone Scripts: Volume Two, ed. Stanley Wiater (Springfield, PA: Edge Books, 2002), 204–5.
25. Sheldon J. Korchin and George E. Ruff, “Personality Characteristics of the Mercury Astronauts,” in The Threat of Impending Disaster, Contributions to the Psychology of Stress, ed. George H. Grosser, Henry Wechsler, and Milton Greenblatt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 204–7.
26. Even devoted space enthusiasts would likely have scoffed at the film: trying to make a feature out of a mix of widescreen narrative scenes and nonwidescreen NASA stock footage, Donner merely stretched half the shots, producing a movie that is virtually unwatchable.
27. See David J. Shayler, NASA’s Scientist-Astronauts (New York: Springer, 2006).
28. See, e.g., Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
29. The Absent Minded Professor, DVD, directed by Robert Stevenson (1961; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Home Video, 2003); Son of Flubber, DVD, directed by Robert Stevenson (1963; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2004); The Nutty Professor, DVD, directed by Jerry Lewis (1963; Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2004).
30. See, e.g., Loyd S. Swenson, James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA, 1966); Roger E. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles (Washington, DC: NASA, 1980); Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).
31. H. A. Rey, Curious George Gets a Medal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
32. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Bantam, 2001), 300.
33. Collins, Carrying the Fire, 76, 80.
34. David J. Shayler, Skylab: America’s Space Station (Chichester, UK: Praxis, 2001), 106–7, 116. The selected astronaut candidates included engineers Owen Garriott and Edward Gibson, physicians Duane Graveline and Joseph Kerwin, physicist Frank Curtis Michel, and geologist Harrison “Jack” Schmitt.
35. The 1967 Group Scientist Astronauts included physicists Joseph Allen IV and Anthony England; engineers Philip Chapman and William Lenoir; astronomers Karl Henize, Brian O’Leary, and Robert Parker; physicians Donald Holmquest, F. Story Musgrave, and William Thornton; and chemist John Llewellyn. See, generally, Shayler, NASA’s Scientist-Astronauts.
36. Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 143, 150.
37. Walter Cunningham, The All-American Boys, rev. ed. (New York: ibooks, 2003), 285. Although a scientist as well as a test pilot, Cunningham was forced to declare his allegiance upon joining the Astronaut Office.
38. “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958,” in Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, ed. John M. Logsdon, NASA History Series (Washington, DC: NASA, 1995), 335.
39. Cunningham, The All-American Boys, 284–85.
40. Donald K. Slayton and Michael Cassutt, Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 271; Richard Witkin, “Scientist Expected to Be Picked for Moon Trip: Space Agency Reported Set to Name a Geologist Move Is Viewed as Attempt to Answer Criticism,” New York Times, December 12, 1969.
41. Shayler, Skylab: America’s Space Station, 123. Three more of the first group of scientist-astronauts would fly on the three Skylab missions to the preliminary space station, one on each mission.
42. Slayton and Cassutt, Deke!, 271.
43. Cunningham, The All-American Boys, 108.
44. Slayton and Cassutt, Deke!, 271.
45. Examples include the Hollywood film The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), as well as television’s Stowaway to the Moon (1975) and the short-lived series Far Out Space Nuts (1975).
46. “Most common sailors were rather contemptuous of the scientific ‘idlers,’ as they called anyone who did not stand watch.” Helen M. Rozwadowski, “Small World: Forging a Scientific Maritime Culture for Oceanography,” Isis 87 (1996): 417–18.
47. See, e.g., Stowaway to the Moon, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (CBS, 1975); The Reluctant Astronaut, DVD, directed by Edward J. Montagne Jr. (1967; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2003); Lois C. Philmus, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon (New York: Spartan Books, 1966).
48. 2001: A Space Odyssey, DVD, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1968; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2011).
49. Fantastic Voyage, DVD, directed by Richard Fleischer (1966; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007).
50. Star Wars, DVD, directed by George Lucas (1977; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006).
51. Alien, DVD, directed by Ridley Scott (1979; Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1999).
52. Alvin M. Weinberg, “Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States,” Science 134 (1961): 161–64.
53. Harry Schwartz, “Space Program: Behind the Triumph, Criticism of Goals,” New York Times, August 17, 1969; Warren E. Leary, “Debate over the Shuttle Fleet’s Value to Science Has Been Raging from the Beginning,” New York Times, February 10, 2003.
54. One complaint of scientists during Apollo, for example, was that missions occurred too frequently for adequate analysis to be undertaken of the data each mission yielded. Brian O’Leary, “Topics: Science or Stunts on the Moon?” New York Times, April 25, 1970.
55. Patricia A. Santy, Choosing the Right Stuff: The Psychological Selection of Astronauts and Cosmonauts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 34–35.
56. See, e.g., Roger E. Bilstein, Flight in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
57. William J. Broad, “Reusable Space ‘Truck’ for Orbit Experiments,” New York Times, April 7, 1984.
58. SpaceCamp, DVD, directed by Harry Winer (1986; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004).
59. Philip M. Boffey, “NASA to Seek Observers to Fly on Shuttles,” New York Times, December 16, 1983.
60. Moonraker, DVD, directed by Lewis Gilbert (1979; Santa Monica, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2007).
61. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, directed by Glen A. Larson, NBC, 1979–1981.
62. The Right Stuff, DVD, directed by Philip Kaufman (1983; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2011).
63. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination, 84.
64. Apollo 13, DVD, directed by Ron Howard (1995; Universal City, CA: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2006).
65. Deep Impact, DVD, directed by Mimi Leder (1998; Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment, 2004); Space Cowboys, DVD, directed by Clint Eastwood (2000; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010).
66. Mission to Mars, DVD, directed by Brian De Palma (2000; Burbank, CA: Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2002).
67. John H. Foote, Clint Eastwood: Evolution of a Filmmaker (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), 136.
68. Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, Basic Books, 1985), 141.
69. Red Planet, DVD, directed by Antony Hoffman (2000; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010).
70. Moon, directed by Duncan Jones (Hollywood, CA: Sony Pictures Classics, 2009).