Screen:

...He reverted to the mentality of the test pilots from whose ranks most of the astronauts had been recruited, and whose only code of honor was to have "the Right Stuff...

...Where's the window so we can look out...

...to fly past his porthole...

...He was pitching and yawing and turning every which-a-way...

...There had to be a hundred computers monitoring every space shot, a hundred engineers trying to iron out the bugs beforehand, a hundred back-up systems for every phase of the flight...

...John Glenn (Ed Harris) wants to know...

...The communications black-out normally caused by the buffeting of the capsule didn't lift after a few minutes, as it was supposed to...

...One of the movie's best sequences is of old color newsreels in which rocket after rocket collapses on the launch pad during test firings...

...Yet one couldn't help the feeling that what was really needed to get beyond the frontiers to which bureaucracy could carry you, to penetrate the unknown, were the traditional American virtues of self-reliance, an ability to improvise, and daring...

...But once he was up there out of reach, he surprised everybody- including, I suspect, himself-by turning back into a jet jockey, a "hot dog...

...At the time, he was selling trash compactors in southern California, so I asked him about them...

...Still, it's too bad, because Carpenter seems to me, in all his tediousness, the very essence of an astronaut hero...

...He put every spec, stat, and dat neatly in place, programmatically reviewed every option, checked and double-checked every hydraulic line...

...I'd rather watch paint dry...

...John Glenn had encountered the phenomenon as well...

...and then, just in case the precautions weren't enough, or weren't the right ones, you had to have some guy who was capable of "flying by wire...

...How else could a pilot orient himself properly to the horizon line of the earth when flying in space...

...The fascination Scott Carpenter held for me was that he seemed to embody, in his dullness and his craziness, the contradiction that the space age holds for us all...

...I'd have bought a compactor from him just to shut him up...

...There's a scene in Kaufman's movie where the seven Mercury astronauts come to inspect the prototype of their capsule for the first time...

...NASA was slow to admit the necessity of this last item on their checklist...

...It turns out that he was the filmmaker with the Right Stuff after all...

...I have to give him that...

...He gives it the space it needs...

...Doing an elaborate portrait of someone you were dealing with personally and hoping to be guided by might have been a problem...

...He barreled through the complex schedule of experiments he'd been given, and then spent much of his time playing with the hydrogen peroxide thrusters that controlled the capsule's attitude...

...I was ready to augur out...

...Forty minutes later, while the nation still held its breath, a reconnaissance plane found Carpenter floating happily in a raft beside the capsule, which had splashed down 250 miles off target...

...It really is an inspiring story, an irresistible one, and Kaufman sees its largeness...

...Since billions of dollars were at stake, and the whole world was watching, the program needed astronauts who were sober, responsible types, team players...

...When the space program was being started up, there were many confusions and disasters...

...Boring...

...That was on May 24, 1962, when his Mercury space capsule rode a huge Atlas rocket into earth orbit...

...He warned me right away that he wasn't too thrilling a conversationalist, and he wasn't shucking...

...In the movie version of The Right Stuff, Carpenter plays only a minor part, which is a shame...

...He did, for a while...

...There was at least one moment in his life when he wasn't the colorless drudge I met in California, when he really got fired up, excited, carried away...

...He told me...

...He "copied a pad," as Mission Control would say, on the subject of garbage...

...NASA feared that Carpenter's monkeyshines had cost him the ability to line up correctly for re-entry, that the capsule had burned with him inside as it came down...

...But then he accidentally banged the hatch door and caused a swarm of "fireflies" (ionized particles collected on the capsule's metal surface...

...But it hadn't...

...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Once he was up there, weightless, Carpenter got a kind of heavenly rapture of the deep-rapture of the spheres, they might have called it...

...But I must admit that while neglecting his particular story, Kaufman's script and direction have not left anything out...

...In both the movie and the book on which it is based, what makes these astronauts heroes, as much as their achievements in space, is the battle they fought on the ground for control of the capsules...

...By the end of his last orbit, the automatic controls were no longer functional...

...Carpenter couldn't resist swinging the capsule to and fro some more in order to observe this curiosity better as he banged away on the hatch door...

...His re-entry angle was off by nine degrees, nor did he have any fuel left to control oscillation as he plummeted back toward earth...

...Apparently the movie itself got off to a similar start...

...He was a great salesman, though...

...Maybe writer-director Philip Kaufman decided to cut down the role, compared to Tom Wolfe's book anyway, because the real Scott Carpenter was acting as technical advisor on the film...

...He was also using up the fuel he would need to orient himself for re-entry, and Capcom ordered him to cut it out...

...It is as if they were keeping the possibility of heroism itself alive-the right to take your fate into your own hands, to risk everything, maybe even to be reckless, for the satisfaction of having survived in the end, of having proven yourself to yourself, and to everyone else in the bargain...

...And where are the explosive bolts on the hatch that can be operated from inside, another member of the crew demands...

...He had to go through the re-entry sequence manually-"fly by wire," as the astronauts put it...

...Over a year ago, articles began to appear suggesting that the film would never fly...

...The man I met in California, someone who was calm and steady to the point of dullness, was what NASA thought they had gotten in Carpenter...

...But like his astronaut heroes, Kaufman has had the last word...

...The qualities that I found in Carpenter alone Kaufman discovers in all the astronauts put together...

...A mistake...

...They had to be men who could recognize that when the national interest was at stake, they must take their orders from wiser heads than their own, even from computers if necessary...

...The Catch-22 of the space program was that a program required one kind of human being, while letting yourself be hurtled into outer space required quite another...

...I'm sure that nobody was more amazed at Carpenter's larking than the people of NASA...