I saw the "Made for TV" movie

IMDB Reference


According to the plot Summary

If I can add in some extra plot details

(SPOILER WARNING)

Todd and his father launched their own model rockets, then a few days before Todd's father is due to fly in Endevour, he dies in a accident when Todd switches on a light that causes an electrical fault and ignites the fuel for a model rocket.

Todd and mother move away to stay with the grandfather runs some kind of struggling space museum, where Mom is an estate agent.

Todd is not doing so well at school and at the same time as the dreaded senior school science project, the grandfather is offered the last Redstone rocket by a junkyard person (How would he get his mits on military hardware is never adequately explained) When the Grandfather reads the science project proposal of Todd and his female science project partner (obligatory love interest?), to restore the redstone missile and a Mercury capsule in the museum to working order using modern parts, he buys the Redstone missile.

After a near fatal fire accident, when Todd is about to give up, the Grandfather reveals that the whole science class is coming in to help as a joint class project instead of individual projects. (Do Schools in the US really do such major science projects?) There is the obligatory bully / jerk who decides not to go along.

For the film they got Alan Bean to play himself, where all the students ask all sorts of tech questions. Alan Bean is totally out of his depth with them. I suppose the Neil and Buzz would have had trouble with these questions. I wish I had videoed this then i could replay them all, as they are the kind of questions, JayUtah and co could easily answer.

After a ground test goes wrong, they bring in some more astronauts, including Duane Lamb to solve the problem. After a successful ground test, a NASA guy shows up with a warrent to prevent any further work.

Then Endeavour passes unexpectadly through a meteor shower and is crippled. There are no other shuttles available and no Russian craft available. As the Mercury capsule and the Redstone rocket are the only thing available, they are commandeered, taken to Vandernburg and kitted out with Solid Rocket Fuel Boosters.

The Grandfather, as he was once trained to fly on Apollo, due for Apollo 11, only to be pulled when a medic spotted a mild heart murmer, is asked to fly the capsule to deliver a box of spare parts, so endeavour can get home. He declines and suggests Todd flys the mission.

Todd Flys the mission, gets the box of parts to Endevour, and then returns to Earth in the Capsule. I did wonder why they bring him back on the shuttle, but I suppose they wanted to show a Mercury capsule on re-entry, and I suppose an unsecured payload in the shuttle, of the capsule would not be such a good idea.

My main observation of this film was that the CGI was poorly done and obvious. A part where the school lot put the capsule on the rocket looked like a NASA annimation. I suppose made for TV movies can not afford more sophisticated CGI.

I also wonder how feasible it would be for a Mercury capsule, on an improved rocket to meet a space shuttle, just to deliver a small box of parts. I would have thought an unmanned rocket would have done, just like the way they used to resupply Mir.

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Ouch, the plot summary sounds like there were some rather fatal flaws, a high school kid flying a critical mission? Unexpected meteor shower? How did a junkyard guy get an entire almost working rocket? How do high school kids get the parts to repair said rocket? Ah well, to be honest it sounds like so many other space movies out
there that I'm not surprised.

Just as a shot in the dark, when NASA said that they had to stop working did the teacher threaten to fail them? If not did either she or the grandfather tell them that they'd done a fine job anyways? That just sounds like the sort of thing that would be said in a movie like that.

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The teacher never said anything, the Grandfather just told them they had been shut down.

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

The first part was kind of sweet, but then it completely destroyed all of that by going into that ridiculous climax that threw scientific credibility out of the window.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

Did you manage to see it then?

Can you remember the questions they fired at Alan Bean, I would love to have got them taped so we could fire the off at JayUtah, if they have not already been dealt with on Clavius.

The first one was something to do with batteries IIRC.

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Well, assuming a Redstone w/boosters could put a capsule into orbit (which I seriously doubt), the Mercury wasn't able to change its orbit or maneuver to rendezvous.

That said, I've got a real soft-spot for that sort of story. Sort of a Rocket Ship Galileo thing. I remember an after-school TV movie from when I was a kid was called Stowaway to the Moon: A kid hides in the trash compartment of an Apollo capsule the night before launch. The crew finds him shortly after TLI, so they're committed to the mission. While the LM crew was on the lunar surface, the Command Module Pilot gets incapacitatingly sick. Of course, the kid (with a lot of coaching from the ground) saves the day. That really had my head in the clouds for a while.

I drew the line at Space Camp, however.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

Ugh, don't remind me, please, don't. Bad one liners, predictable plot, and an impossible situation.

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Did this film ever make it to DVD?

I would love to have got the list of those questions to see how you all would have handled them

Yes this is a resurrected thread, I was looking for one where I linked to an animation of some kind of collision with Mercury, the planet, As I had to pull the file due to the website it was hosted on being about to close down. I want to put it on YouTube and I wanted to find the post I did to explain the animation but could not find it on BAUT anymore

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Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

IMDB says no. I did a bunch of searches and found a movie with the same name, but not this movie.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

From one of the IMDB reviews:

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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

14?! Did I miss a sequel?

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Yeah, and it was easily 7.7% better than Apollo 13!

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.