A rather dry, less than exciting but well-acted snapshot of the space race during the Cold war period of the late 1960s. The film deals with complex emotions and human behavior instead of technology but suffers from a lack of tension and suspense.
The Soviets are about to launch a manned mission to the moon.
A desperate bid by the US to land a man on the moon before the Soviets do.
An Apollo moon program that isn’t ready to launch yet.
A rushed preparation to send a single astronaut in a modified Gemini capsule to land on the moon.
He is to remain alone on the moon in a lunar shelter for a year until an Apollo mission can rescue him.
BUT.....
Who will be selected for this hastily prepared and perilous mission and can it succeed?
Directed by Robert Altman
Produced by William Conrad
Screenplay by Loring Mandel
Based on “The Pilgrim Project” by Hank Searls
Music by Leonard Rosenman
Cinematography: William W. Spencer
Edited by Gene Milford
Production company: A William Conrad Production
Distributed by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
Running time: 101 minutes
Cast
James Caan as Lee Stegler
Joanna Moore as Mickey Stegler
Robert Duvall as Chiz Stewart
Barbara Baxley as Jean
Charles Aidman as Gus
Steve Ihnat as Ross Duellan
Michael Murphy as Rick
Ted Knight as Walter Larson
Stephen Coit as Ehrman
John Rayner as Dunc
Charles Irving as Seidel
Bobby Riha as Stevie Stegler
We are transported back to the late 1960s, a time we recall being one of change, the rise of counter-culture and impending social and political turmoil. Shielded from all of the ructions of the times within the bubble of the Gemini and Apollo moon programs, we find three astronauts training in an Apollo 3 simulator with their main concern consisting of having their session being aborted abruptly with the “third orbit coming up.”
The astronauts inhabit a world of buzz and crew-cutted, skinny-tied, narrow-trousered and short shirt-sleeved mission focused dedication to the achievement of a history-making goal: sending a man to the moon.
At a get-together at Lee Stegler’s place, Chiz Stewart reveals to his fellow astronauts what he knows about the reason for the earlier abort. The US will be sending a man to the moon, “one man all the way” as part of a secret alternate plan, an “emergency backup to Apollo” called “Pilgrim.” This will be undertaken in response to the Russians having “a one-man mission circling the moon” followed by their sending a moon-landing mission “in the next lunar cycle, three to four weeks.”
As a result, in three weeks time one man is be made ready to be sent to the Moon in a one-way rocket using a modified Project Gemini craft involving “an uprated Saturn, with a new third stage and a new landing stage for one man twice the space, twice the life support.” He will stay on the Moon for “ten months, a year - eight months” in a shelter pod “stocked with food, oxygen, all life-support systems” that has been launched and landed before him. Later, a manned Apollo mission will come to retrieve him.
Chiz is to be the “moon-man” but instead of a rousing round of congratulations there is a sense of skepticism in that it seems that they’ll rushing through pre-flight preparations and cutting things a bit fine. One can also cut the air of disappointment that is being exuded from Lee, although he would not admit it outright.
The danger and stress involved with such a mission is not just confined to the astronaut chosen to undertake it. Lee’s wife can image how Chiz’s wife, Jean must be feeling knowing that she will not be seeing her husband again for up to one year, presuming of course that he survives. The wives are just supposed to be able to suck it up and be “tough” presumably knowing full well what the score was when they married military men who are a part of the space program.
Wouldn’t you know it? The damn Ruskies have manged to throw another spanner in the works. They have had the effrontery to send up a civilian, Alexis Plekhanov who is a 34 year old geologist and a specialist in lunar terrain but who has had no military training. So what’s the problem? Geo-politics has so far managed to puncture the space program bubble of isolation and carry it pell-mell towards success or disaster.
Chiz, although well-trained and more than qualified to undertake the moon landing mission, is an Air Force colonel. With the Russians sending up scientists, NASA and the White House insist that an American civilian be their first man on the Moon “or the program is jeopardized” as “even a technical military connection could be used against us.”
As a result of the political, bureaucratic and public relations fiasco, Lee is selected to replace Chiz. Chiz cannot hide his outrage and disgust at what has happened. He declares, “I should be the one to fly it, damn it!” on the basis that “I know the machine, I know the mission, I know my skills.”
Just as bad for Lee is his wife’s reaction to the news. She knows her husband too well and understands how he would respond to the proposal put to him. Guess who will be sleeping on the sofa tonight!
After some bitter wrangling, Chiz agrees to train Lee and be his backup. Chiz is determined to push Lee hard both in order to get him ready and to see him drop out so he can step back in. Chiz tells Lee point blank: “You're not gonna make it. You don't have a prayer…..When you find out how much you don't know we'll see how bad you wanna go. I'll be right on your tail. I'll scrub you.
MISSION PLAN
• Target area: Oceanus Procellarum, the Sea of Storms.
• Shelter capsule launched from the Cape 6 days & 14 hours.
• Pilgrim launch 6 days later.
• Lunar approach just prior to lunar sunrise to aid sighting of shelter beacon.
• Failure scenario: orbit the moon & return into the gravitational influence of the Earth for re-entry.
• Success scenario: activation of shelter containing micro meteoroid protection & life-support systems to maintain the astronaut for two months.
• Additional supplies sent periodically for up to one year or until Apollo lunar landing is ready.
At the briefing at which the mission plan is outlined, Gus Ehrman as part of the team and who holds a naval commission and has a medical degree, is incensed at not having been informed and raises objections to the plan that will involve an astronaut having to make a manual landing after enduring a three day trip while being weightless, soaking wet and suffering from bilateral conjunctivitis from oxygen bathing his eyes. While in this state, he will be required to locate a shelter beacon and upon braking will suffer being “slammed in the chest with twice his Earth weight.”
As Gus storms out in disgust at an obvious failure in communication and what this might entail for the success or otherwise of the mission, we might recall some the lyrics from the song at the party just prior to Chiz and Lee’s confrontation:
“Stop making friends”
Gus is cautioned to “make no noise” but despite holding a naval commission, he sees his medical role and his friend’s health as being a priority rather than helping to “feed this boy into a sausage machine and tell him that it doesn't hurt.” Nevertheless, Gus is threatened into submission with the prospect of court-martial if he speaks out.
After a test flight, Lee’s demeanor and speech patterns suggest a great deal of inner doubt, uncertainty and insecurity as to his ability to be adequately prepared in time for the Lunar mission.
Hopping around like a little over-exuberant puppy dog seeking approval, he appeals to Chiz, “Chiz, tell him how I did, huh?” This is followed by his observations about the capsule as being small but that he is “getting the feel of it” and that despite it having been “a little rough at first…. you get used to it.” His conclusion: “The, the capsule, real secure.”
Despite Lee’s stammered assessment of his ability to operate the capsule, as well as his promise to his wife that “if anything doesn't look right to me, I'd get out,” it is hard for a man to argue with his sense of pride and need to succeed. To accept anything less would be admitting failure, weakness and a diminished sense of self-worth.
The next step in Lee’s training for Lunar conditions is the Pilgrim shelter activation test A9-35. Under the scrutiny of surveillance cameras, Lee is hooked up to a harness to simulate 1/6th gravity and his “first big problem” when he lands on the moon’s surface will be to find the survival shelter.
With the temperature at about 250 below, chamber pressure down to ten to the minus eight and with two hours of oxygen in his bio-pack, Lee runs into a bit of trouble using his “Peter Pan ring” or harness to gain entry to the shelter.
On the verge of having the test aborted, Chez intervenes in order to get Lee to figure out for himself how to get out of this fix he’s found himself in. After all, once on the moon “he'll be alone up there.”
Suddenly, an air supply hose on Lee’s suit becomes disconnected resulting in his body heat rate increasing, a heart rate of 120 along with his suit pressure down to 3.5 PSI.
“Full safety. Problem's cleared”
With ninety seconds of emergency O2 remaining and suit pressure down to 3.3 PSI, Chiz is all for allowing Lee to work the problem out and make it back to the shell himself. In the end, Chiz is “vetoed” and he pointedly and rhetorically asks, “who'll be there to help him on the moon?” The ending of the test answers that question – “not a soul” but Lee himself.
Excerpts from,
Reports have been circulating that “McDonnell Aircraft just delivered a modified Gemini capsule to the Cape” and that “it's going on a booster”…...It is also rumored that “the next manned shot is scheduled in two months…...”
An unnamed source within NASA has been quoted as saying that the United States is “sending a guy to the Moon in a Gemini” He then went on to say, “Look, I can give you the names of those who've, uh suddenly dropped out of Apollo routine. I can tell you the name of the program. It's "Pilgrim"…..”
If this report is true, the question remains: WHY? Does it have something to do with the Russians who it has been speculated are………..
By F. Seidel
“He'll either panic or dump the mission”
During another test simulation, (the third in two days) it becomes apparent that Lee is struggling to cope with the pressure as one malfunction and failure scenario after another is thrown at him. At one point he blurts out over the radio, “Hey, I don't know what you're throwing at me, CAPCOM!”
After the abort Lee tries to justify his performance on the grounds that he had been thrown too many problems and that he had control. It has become obvious that Lee has to be taken off the program.
“Who's the better man?”
Chiz is for having Lee scrubbed from the Pilgrim program and having himself reinstated. Ross questions whether Chiz is motivated more by his own ego rather than questions over Lee’s preparedness and safety considerations. He tells Chiz that he would not be put in Lee’s place and that the program will just have to be shut down. Lee himself declares that he can be ready in time to undertake the mission and complete safely.
“I don't know how it got out, but it leaked.”
Realizing the futility of having the press sworn to secrecy and concealing from the public the existence of such a large project, it is decided that Lee will leave for the Cape the next day as planned and that the day after “the shelter goes.” Five days after that, Lee flies.
In Chiz and Lee’s line of work and in the context of competition within such a program as Pilgrim, personal ego and vaulting ambition cannot be avoided. To be the first man on the moon! Who wouldn’t want that honor? Hence the rift developing between friends and the doors being slammed in faces. Lee tells Chiz that he could not make the mission on the grounds that, “you got the guts, but you haven't got the brains.”
As if they enjoy dumping bad news on the heads of the Americans, it turns out that the Russians have launched a week early. It seems that they’ll be getting to the moon first and “you know there can only be one first man on the Moon.”
A rift in another relationship is about to develop, this time between Lee and Gus. Gus points out the dangers involved in such a hastily put together mission as Pilgrim from getting hit by a meteor, being blasted by radiation, Lee falling on his back and not being able to get back up, through to being “hit in the left eyeball by a dust-sized particle or a rock going 70,000 miles an hour.”
Listening to this is Lee’s wife who feels that she has been lied to by her husband if he did in fact know of such dangers involved with the mission.
Worse still for Lee is the sense of betrayal at discovering that his friend Gus had spoken to his wife hoping to stop Lee from jumping in over his head into the mission. Lee tells Gus, “you know, Chiz, Chiz at least was honest” while Gus replies, “I want you to survive. I value you.”
The anger and stress felt by Lee has reached boiling point and he responds in an uncharacteristically savage manner toward his wife as he tells her to just smile, “if it kills you, you just smile.”
Mickey is not yet aware that her husband truly believes that he will come back alive and well after completing the mission and that he has “never had a thought of not coming back” as he’s “the guy that's gonna do it.” The mission is tied up with who he believes he is and that if he didn’t make this trip then he’d always be left asking himself the question, “who the hell am I?” A question in these times many a man has had to ask himself!
The problem for Mickey Stegler is that her smile will have to conceal the fact that she will feel that she’ll have “no place to go,” not even to the pool without reporters with microphones in hand asking her the one question she does not want to contemplate, "Do you really think he'll come back, Mrs. Stegler?" The smile will also have to hide her feelings at having every aspect of her life being placed under close scrutiny, evaluation and comment such as “having a mother who was divorced and a father who drank too much,” not to mention herself being a blonde! A fate many women in the public eye have had to face.
“Everything that could go wrong has”
While everything has been going well with the Russian mission, the problems with the radar beacon on the Pilgrim mission’s shelter “substantially reduces our probability of success.” The beacon is still up but there’s a guidance problem and if “the Surveyor can't find it, we don't have a shelter.”
Despite the problems with the mission, Lee is strongly in favor of proceeding seeing that everything else seems to be functioning and that they know approximately where the shelter is: “it's up there, it's warm, it's working. We're ready.”
Television News Broadcast:
“'The three-man Russian ship is expected to land tomorrow morning and as usual Moscow has released no information.
'Even though the Russians will be the first on the Moon, Washington has made the decision to go ahead with project Pilgrim.
'So Lee Stegler will launch tomorrow morning as scheduled.
'This the latest news from Washington.'”
“Don't get any cute ideas”
Having “been ordered not to land unless you see the shelter,” the next day Lee prepares to blast off for the moon. After Lee is inserted into the capsule and the hatch is closed, Lee grips Chiz’s hand with both of his gloved hands. In that action a bond has been re-established between the two men and it seems as if Lee doesn’t want to let go of Chiz’s hand as if he is reluctant to let go of an important link or anchor and that to do so will find him well and truly cast adrift and on his own.
With the shelter pod having already been launched and successfully landed, Lee too is finally launched on schedule. Everything initially appears to be going well and he’s “right on the button.”
Meanwhile Chiz and his team have left to catch their plane bound for Houston Mission Control from where they will take over Lee’s flight. At the moment all they have to contend with is just a bit of air turbulence.
“He's in one hell of a spot”
Lee is soon required to perform a midcourse correction in which the “cryogenic fueled landing engine will push the capsule into a slightly changed path…..to minimize the air and get the astronaut the best possible view of the area where the shelter would be found.” Lee radios back that he has no light and that he can feel the thrust but that his engine fire indicator isn’t on. Back at mission control, however they have confirmed firing.
It isn’t long before a power drain malfunction is discovered in Lee’s capsule which interrupts radio contact and causes heat loss.
With the loss of electrical power there's no way to repair without a risk of the retros firing and sending Lee out of trajectory with the result that he would never get back. Lee is therefore instructed to cut off as many electrical systems as he can and then go on to suit pressure and heat and let the cabin temperature go down. Finally he is to cut off his radio transmitter and go into sleep mode for four hours before resuming contact.
This situation is a real test for Lee as he now must contend with his own fears: fear of having his only lifeline to Earth cut off, fear that “these controls might freak out when the temperature drops,” and fear of confronting his own mortality alone.
Back at Mission Control, Mickey Stegler has a medical readout of Lee’s vital life signs – respiration, heart beat, blood pressure, temperature - as the only link to her husband’s essence. He may be “functioning beautifully, but everything’s all wrong.”
Not as far as the public are concerned as public relations spin seeks to manage and massage information”:
“Pilgrim control now reports that Astronaut Lee Stegler having successfully completed his mid-course maneuver, he's now observing a period of radio silence.”
With a nice bit of deflection, the assembled news reporters’ attention is swiftly directed to the situation of the three man Russian Voskhod ship. It seems that they have also lost contact with their team:
“They should have landed on the Moon twelve to fourteen hours ago. But up to now, no word has been received.”
Finally, it is time to end the press briefing on a positive note about the plan of the Pilgrim Project:
“When Lee Stegler lands on the Moon he'll immediately make his way to this survival shelter which contains all the necessary life support systems. He'll find it by means of this rotating beacon. Once inside the shelter he'll remain there until we send up another survival shelter or until the Apollo team goes up to get him. The telemetry aboard the shelter will notify us immediately the minute he's safely inside.”
On their way out there’s a free-for-all for freebies of copies and photographs of the shelter along with other “paraphernalia” they might need.
As Lee orbits the Moon, he is not able to see the beacon of the shelter. Suddenly he exclaims, “Oh my God!” For a moment it is as if he is struck by the enormity of what he is witnessing from his viewing port – the surface of another world. Perhaps he is also struck by the enormity of what he is about to do and whether it is more than one man can cope with.
With not much more than 90 seconds left before he must abort and return to Earth, Lee is instructed by Chiz, “under no circumstances attempt to land unless you have a confirmed sighting.” With mere seconds remaining, Lee suddenly blurts out, “I believe I see it east of Hansteen.” He has in fact lied about seeing the beacon. Mission Control gives permission for Lee’s retro burn and he decelerates as he lands the capsule. As one mission control team member observes, “he cut the cord, he can't come back.”
“Mission control reports that Pilgrim has just landed successfully on the Moon.”
With all radio contact is lost, Lee exits the Gemini lander and walks on the bleak lunar surface with two hours and forty minutes of oxygen in his suit.
Back at Mission Control, there is no indication received from telemetry that Lee has located the shelter. In fact, Chiz is wise to the fact that Lee hadn’t sighted it as he used the phrase, "Believe I've sighted." Chiz knows this is an old fighter pilot phrase, “what you say when you fire into the dark and hope you hit a target.”
There is speculation as to why Lee would choose to land without being sure. Ultimately it was his decision to make and that the “gravitational pull of the Moon is very strong to the mind with imagination.” With the prospect of a new pristine world before him and Lee having the opportunity to set foot on it,“anybody with the courage to go would have landed” and “that's why Stegler is there.”
After a while and with barely an hour’s worth of oxygen left in his bio-pack, Lee comes across the crashed Russian lander lying on its side with the three dead cosmonauts lying partly within and around it. In tribute to his fellow astronauts, Lee takes the Soviet flag from a dead cosmonaut and lays it on a nearby rock together with his own American flag. This stands as a statement of the fact that the goal of landing on the moon was achieved not just by a particular country but by the skill, will, effort, sacrifice and spirit of human beings.
“Lee Stegler has less than seven minutes of oxygen left”
With little air left and not knowing which direction to take to reach the shelter, Lee resorts to chance and hope by spinning the toy mouse his son gave him to take on the mission. He walks in the direction that the toy mouse ends up pointing in.
With hope ebbing away back on earth, Lee notices that he has mere minutes of air left. Suddenly a red glow on his arm and watch catches his attention. It is the shelter’s locator beacon and our last sight of Lee is of him walking towards the shelter and a renewed hope for his survival.
Points Of Interest
“Countdown” is a 1968 science fiction film directed by Robert Altman, based on the 1964 novel “The Pilgrim Project” by Hank Searls. It was released eighteen months before the first manned mission to the moon in 1969.
The film’s working title was “Moonshot” and production was assisted by cooperation from NASA who lent its facilities at Cocoa Beach, Florida. Filming took place in part at NASA facilities in early 1967, immediately after the January pad fire in Apollo 1 in which the crew perished during a ground test.
Altman was fired as director of the film due to the inclusion of overlapping dialogue. What studio executives mistook for incompetence was really the director's attempt at achieving the illusion of reality. If I recall, this was a technique used in “TheThing From Another World” to very good effect.
Director Altman had previously directed “The Delinquents” (1955) and “The James Dean Story” (1957), as well as directing TV series such as “Combat” over a ten year period.
It now seems a bit quaint and unusual to feature a modified Gemini spacecraft in a lunar landing. In the film, The Pilgrim spacecraft is a hybrid of a complete Gemini spacecraft grafted onto the descent stage of an Apollo lunar module. However, it seems that there had been proposals in the mid 1960s to use modified Gemini craft for lunar orbital and even lunar landings to complement the Apollo flights. One such lunar Gemini program, "Big Gemini" would have accommodated as many as 12 astronauts, but this and other proposals were rejected or never went beyond the concept stage for a variety of reasons.
Lee’s landing site is the "Sea of Storms" or “Oceanus Procellarum / Ocean of Storms and it is where Apollo 12's lunar module "Intrepid" landed on 19 November 1969. The film’s moon landing sequence was simulated in the Mojave Desert.
“Countdown” is a film of its time featuring a Space Race within the context of the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union. NASA was charged with the seemingly impossible task of fulfilling President Kennedy's challenge of "sending a man to the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade. The point of this enterprise was not necessarliy to expand humanity’s frontiers and scientific knowledge but was instead aimed at getting a man on the moon and safely back before the Russians did.
Interestingly enough, over fifty year later we still talk in terms of a "space race" when referring to upcoming lunar and Mars missions even though the old Cold War is over. A race with whom and to what end? It seems that the quest for human knowledge, expanded horizons and sheer wonder is instead being replaced by the need to privatize, corporatize, extract, consume, obtain profit and gain strategic advantage from our endeavors in space. Technology has certainly progressed but the same cannot be said for our mentality. Our space junk and refuse has certainly increased exponentially over the decades.
The idea of sending a craft with an astronaut to another world and allowing him to stay there, kept alive by an environment habitat provisioned with supplies and the sending of further supplies via unmanned rockets seems like a scaled-down version of similar earlier scenarios that were envisioned for future lunar and Mars missions. Of course, on Mars and even on the moon we will have to come up with ways of becoming self-sustaining using the available resources of the new worlds we’ll inhabit to obtain breathable air, water, fuel and power.
Overall, "Countdown" is somewhat flat and pedestrian, lacking any real tension and suspense unlike its contemporary film, “Marooned” (1969). The only real exception was the climactic scenes featuring Lee Stegler’s lunar descent and his coming across the dead cosmonauts on the lunar surface.
“Countdown” certainly suffered from its evident lack of budget. This showed in its depiction of the mission control room and the moon walk sequence both of which looked rather disappointing and lacked realism.
©Chris Christopoulos 2021
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