

First Man also explores the toll the inherent danger of early space program took on the astronauts, their wives and families. While focusing on Armstrong’s spaceflight career, First Man depicts the astronaut’s grief after the death of his two-year-old daughter Karen and close friends Elliot See and Ed White. The film, which won an Academy Award for best visual effects, follows Armstrong from a 1961 test flight of the X-15 spaceplane to the conclusion of the Apollo 11 mission.

Ryan Gosling stars as Neil Armstrong in this 2018 biographical drama based on the book “First Man: The Life of Neil A.
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Among its champions is NASA, whose headquarters now lies on Hidden Figures Way, and whose software validation facility in West Virginia bears Katherine Johnson’s name. Though not as famous as the astronauts they helped reach orbit, the mathematicians gained belated notoriety through the Oscar-nominated film. These three African American women, and many of their colleagues, calculated trajectories and other critical numbers for the Mercury program while overcoming segregation and sexism in the early 1960s. The film is based on a novel by Carl Sagan, who modeled Arroway after real-life SETI astronomer Jill Tarter.Ĭapturing, as the name suggests, the story of those not seen, this retelling of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson’s work at NASA spotlights their vital contribution as mathematicians to getting John Glenn to space and back in one piece. When that search does find an extraterrestrial signal, she’s thrust into decidedly terrestrial conflicts about deciphering the message and using it to make contact with whoever, or whatever, sent it from the star Vega. What happens when they find something? That’s the tale of Contact, which stars Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer compelled since childhood to look for signals from alien worlds even as others warn that she is throwing away a promising scientific career.
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Critics loved it, too, which helps explain how this visually stunning drama about isolation, fear and survival won seven Oscars, the most of any movie that year.įor decades, astronomers have been scanning the skies for radio signals from other civilizations. Despite Gravity‘s sometimes flimsy physics and technical goofs, it also manages to get enough details right to make it a SpaceNews reader favorite.

The Kessler Syndrome gets the Hollywood treatment in this low-Earth-orbit thriller starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as Hubble repair astronauts left stranded in space when a Russian anti-satellite missile test sets off a thrilling but unrealistically swift sequence of orbital debris strikes that cripple the duo’s space shuttle and leaves LEO looking like a 20-car pileup. Nominated for the American Film Institute’s top 100 list of most inspiring American movies released before 2005, October Sky remains a favorite of space enthusiasts. Based on the true story of how Hickam went to work for NASA, October Sky is just as revered for its portrayal of Homer’s rise to space notoriety as it is for the challenging yet far from monolithic relationship between him and his intractable coal-miner father. Between scavenging railroads for rocket parts, launching DIY rockets on sometimes frightening trajectories, and striking up a pen-pal relationship with legendary rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, Hickam and his band of misfit friends inspired a dying town to look upward to space instead of down at their dwindling coal reserves. and his friends, the first artificial satellite instilled hope that they could do more with their lives than hold shovels. To a small town of West Virginia coal miners, Sputnik was either a harbinger of Soviet doom or a pointless science experiment, depending on who you asked.
