Houston, we have five great movies about spaceflight

As the SpaceX Crew-10 spacecraft prepares for its launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, commanded by Spokane’s Col. Anne McClain on her second mission to the International Space Station, what better time than now to look at five great movies about spaceflight.

Any list like this is speculative, so we aren’t calling these “the best five movies about spaceflight.” We’ll leave those determinations to you, the reader, and the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, which annually selects 25 historically significant films for preservation.

Three of the five films listed below are on that list.

“Apollo 13” (1995). “Houston, we have a problem.” The dramatization of the ill-fated flight of Apollo 13, which experienced a catastrophic explosion en route to the moon, which forces the scrubbing of their landing as the astronauts – Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) – turn their lunar module into a lifeboat in order to survive their return journey to Earth.

The movie splits time between the crew in space, Flight Director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) and his team at Mission Control working the problem in Houston, and Lovell’s wife Marilyn (Kathleen Quinlan), as she fights to keep her family together, at one point rejecting a NASA public affairs officer’s request for more media access to her home by telling him, “if they have a problem with that, they can take it up with my husband. He’ll be home on Friday.”

When the Apollo 13 crew is brought aboard the recovery ship after splashdown, you’ll see Lovell shake hands with the ship’s captain. The ship’s captain was played by retired NASA astronaut Jim Lovell.

If you were to play the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, Anne McClain’s connection to Kevin Bacon is by location, not person. “Apollo 13” was filmed on location at both the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, while the Bacon brothers – Kevin and his brother Michael – visited Spokane, where they played a concert at Northern Quest Resort & Casino, in 2023.

“Interstellar” (2014). The Earth is dying. Faced with widespread dust storms and crop blights, NASA, operating in secrecy, sends a crew of astronauts, with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway leading the team, through a wormhole near Saturn in the search for a new home for humanity. Seems straightforward up to this point, but “Interstellar” is a Christopher Nolan film, which means it’s not a simple spaceflight movie. Before its conclusion the film bends reality while delving into the heart of humanity and the enduring love shared across time and space between a father and his child.

Matt Damon is a pioneering astronaut who shows up midfilm, and lets just say his attempts at surviving on a distant planet don’t turn out quite as well as he did in …

“The Martian” (2015). The catalyst of this movie is another dust storm, this time raking across the surface of Mars and threatening the first mission to the Red Planet. During the evacuation of the crew, one member, Mark Watney (Matt Damon, again), gets injured, is believed dead and inadvertently left behind. What his crew doesn’t know is that Watney survived, who proceeds to use his “botany powers” to farm potatoes, thus colonizing Mars (“In your face Neal Armstrong”), while the leaders at Mission Control devise a plan to rescue Watney.

Bonus nerd points for the NASA leadership naming their secret meeting Project Elrond after the Council of Elrond from “The Lord of the Rings.” NASA Flight Director Mitch Henderson, played by Sean Bean, attended both secret meetings on the silver screen.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Arguably one of the greatest and scientifically accurate depictions of space flight produced, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001” explores the origins of mankind, millions of years in the past, and brings it forward to a future where Pan Am space clippers bring travelers to space stations where you could stay in a Hilton hotel, enjoy a meal at Howard Johnson’s or call home using a Bell Telephone picturephone.

It’s in this future scientists discover a black monolith buried millions of years before beneath the surface of the moon, and after the monolith sends out a high-pitched radio signal, dispatch a ship – Discovery One – crewed by two Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), and the HAL 9000 computer (Douglas Rain), who becomes the antagonist of the film as they travel toward Jupiter, the destination of that radio signal. By the time the Discovery reaches Jupiter, Bowman is alone, battling HAL for control of the ship and is left to discover the secrets behind the monolith.

The reasons behind HAL’s decisions weren’t fully explored until 1984, when the sequel “2010: The Year We Contact,” was released, which further explored the mystery of the monoliths and determined the fate of the Discovery and its crew near Jupiter.

Fathom Events rereleased 2001 in a limited run in theaters for its 50th anniversary in 2018, which is the only way to truly experience this film in all of its 70mm glory.

“The Right Stuff” (1983). Based on Tom Wolfe’s book by the same name, “The Right Stuff” brought to the big screen the United States’ first attempts at spaceflight, from Chuck Yeagar (Sam Shepard) breaking the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 to the selection, training and flights of the Mercury 7 astronauts, including Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), and Lance Henrikson as Wally Schirra, one of two men to be attacked on film by both the Terminator and an alien (the other being Apollo 13’s Bill Paxton).

The surviving members of the Mercury 7 panned the film for its portrayal of the astronauts, in particular the film’s treatment of Grissom and the loss of the Liberty Bell 7 on splashdown. One person who appreciated his on-screen characterization was Brigadier General Chuck Yeagar, who had a cameo in the film, and compared Sam Shepard’s portrayal of him in the same way Yeagar flew airplanes. The movie received high praise from critics, including Roger Ebert, who called it the best movie of 1983, and it won four Academy Awards out of eight nominations in 1984.

Honorable mentions. These are only called honorable mentions because they’re television series, but if you have time to binge watch shows about space exploration, check out “From the Earth to the Moon” (HBO, 1998), a 12-part miniseries about the Apollo program produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer (who also produced “Apollo 13” two years earlier); and “For All Mankind” (Apple TV+, 2019-), an alternate history series whose point of divergence is that the Soviet Union, not the United States, landed on the moon first. Four seasons are available on Apple TV+ and has been renewed for a fifth season.