NASA

1995 · Ron Howard · 140 min · Drama / Historical

Apollo 13 turned a mission that never reached the moon into one of cinema's great suspense machines, a procedural about duct tape, slide rules, and thousands of people refusing to lose three men to the cold. Ron Howard shoots competence like action, Tom Hanks anchors the capsule, and Ed Harris's mission control turns arithmetic into drama, all of it rendered with a practical authenticity, real weightlessness included, that still embarrasses greener spectacle. The history gets streamlined and the sentiment gets a Hollywood polish. Neither dents the achievement, a thriller where everyone knows the ending and nobody breathes anyway.

1979 · Tom Wolfe · 352 pages · Nonfiction / History

The Right Stuff is Tom Wolfe aiming the full New Journalism arsenal at the Mercury astronauts and the test-pilot brotherhood they came from, and the result remains the most electric book ever written about the space race. Wolfe's real subject is the unspoken code of the title, the pyramid of nerve that put Chuck Yeager at the top and turned seven military pilots into instant American deities, and his prose, italics, exclamation points, and all, flies like the machines. The style exhausts some readers, the mythology plays loose at the edges, and the wives get a chapter where they deserved a book. Nobody has written flying better.

2014 · Andy Weir · 369 pages · Science Fiction

Andy Weir's 2014 novel about an astronaut stranded on Mars who has to science his way home is one of the most purely entertaining science fiction novels in years. The problem-solving is addictive, Mark Watney's voice is consistently funny without undermining the danger, and Weir's commitment to scientific accuracy gives the survival scenarios real weight. The Earth-based chapters are less compelling than Watney's log entries, and the novel's emotional range is narrower than its technical range. But as a celebration of human ingenuity, practical problem-solving, and the stubborn refusal to die quietly, The Martian is irresistible.

2019 · 4 Seasons · Apple TV+ · Science Fiction Drama

For All Mankind is the most ambitious alternate history series on television, using a simple premise, what if the Soviets reached the Moon first, to explore decades of divergent American history through the lens of the space program. Each season's time jump keeps the show from growing stale, and the blend of personal drama with geopolitical stakes gives it an emotional range that most sci-fi series can't match. The show occasionally buckles under the weight of its many storylines, but its best episodes capture the wonder and danger of space exploration with real conviction.

2016 · Theodore Melfi · 127 min · Biographical Drama

Hidden Figures tells a story that deserves to be widely known and tells it in a way that makes it accessible to the widest possible audience. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae bring warmth, intelligence, and humor to three women whose contributions to the space race were overlooked for decades, and the film's crowd-pleasing approach ensures their story reaches people who might never seek out a more demanding version. The trade-off is that the sanitized treatment of racism and the Hollywood formula smooth out complexities that a braver film would have confronted. It's a good film that could have been a great one if it had trusted its audience as much as its protagonists trusted the math.