The Astronaut Asked Groundbreakingly Cynical Questions of NASA

From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).

In December 1972, only three years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, Gene Cernan became the last man to walk on the moon—to date, anyway. After the U.S. won the Space Race, public interest in the Apollo missions dwindled; a little more than a thousand days after all the excitement around Apollo 13, it seemed like few people cared anymore. And so, with such widespread indifference, NASA’s budget was cut to the point where another moon landing was no longer on the cards.

That January, an ABC movie of the week had theorized the lengths NASA might go to to maintain the funding they needed to survive: The Astronaut.

We begin with a televised landing on Mars. Suddenly the picture cuts out. Panic ensues.

Something’s gone badly wrong, and the NASA engineers need time to work it out. Aware that their funding relies on the public perception of their success, they hire an ex-pilot, Eddie Reese (Monte Markham), to play the part of missing astronaut, Colonel Brice Randolph (also Markham), so they can stage a successful re-entry. Eddie will be given plastic surgery to look indistinguishable from the real Brice; when the front is no longer necessary, he will be given another new face, and another new life.

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Despite their best intentions, no one ever quite gets around to telling Brice’s heavily pregnant wife, Gail (Susan Clark), the truth. So despite his discomfort, Eddie has no choice but to pretend that he is her husband. From the astonished way she reacts to his kindness, it appears that the real Brice was, in a domestic setting at least, far from the hero he appeared on TV. Will Eddie’s goodness be the scheme’s undoing? And what happened to the real Brice?

The Astronaut certainly contains its fair share of the ridiculous (Just how many new faces can a person’s skull handle!?!), but what keeps it tethered to Earth is an unusual dedication to emotional grounding. Although the plot has enormous, international, even extra-terrestrial implications, its heart lies in the relationship between two broken people who find some respite from the chaos of their lives in each other.

Gail has been through the wringer, to put it mildly. She’s suffered an emotionally abusive relationship. She has a miscarriage on the day of the staged re-entry. Then she had her hopes that her husband had changed his ways dashed by the realization that the man she’s been living with since his supposed return has been a complete stranger, whom NASA has given her husband’s face. It’s no wonder that she’s at her wit’s end!

While it’s understandable that she’d be angry at Eddie, he’s lured into the scheme with the genuine belief that he’s helping his country, and feels sick with self-loathing at the pain he’s caused someone he’s very much come to care for. He was already carrying around a great deal of guilt from an accident during his pilot days, when he caused the death of three civilians after ejecting from his malfunctioning plane.

If the details of the pair’s suffering can seem soap opera-esque, the MOTW’s dedication to sitting with them in their brokenness gives it a surprising emotional weight. The bruising emotionality of Susan Clark’s performance, Monte Markham’s gentle sadness and the genuine chemistry between them all help to sell The Astronaut’s wilder plot points.

Another thing that helps is the terrible resolution on the sole copies of this MOTW that survive. This is particularly true during the scene where we discover what happened to the original Brice. In images that were cut from the TV broadcast, we see him standing on Mars in a space suit that starts to bulge out in various areas, as if he somehow had a rogue squirrel caught inside it. Soon, the suit is fatally breached. He never made it off Mars. Because the quality of the image is so bad, it seems as if it may be genuine footage that had been festering away in an attic somewhere—that, combined with Brice’s stoic, then increasingly panicky narration via his radio, makes it an unexpectedly frightening sequence.

In the final act, it transpires that the Russians are also planning to send a crew to Mars. Because Brice’s fate has been kept secret, NASA faces a moral quandary: Do they tell Russia what they’ve learned, and give their greatest foes a chance to expose their deception? Or do they allow innocent men to fly into their certain, preventable deaths? After what he’s been through, Eddie has real doubts that they will do the right thing.

While the ten minutes of screentime this dilemma is allotted is clearly not enough to do it real justice, that The Astronaut is willing to ask such searching questions at all—to exhibit real cynicism towards NASA just three years from its monumental moon landing—speaks to the MOTW’s ambition, and its eagerness to engage with contemporaneous events.

Although today it’s hard to find what, if any, impact The Astronaut had on audiences in 1972, there is an interesting nugget on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: “a strong case can be made that Capricorn One (1977) plagiarized this film’s central situation.” Indeed, both do involve missions to Mars where aspects are faked, and both make NASA look like a frightening organization willing to do whatever it takes to retain their precarious funding. For the extra conspiratorially-minded, Capricorn One’s director, Peter Hyams, did direct two editions of the ABC MOTW in 1972: Rolling Man and Goodnight, My Love.

The Astronaut may have planted a seed in Hyams’ head, but from a beat-for beat perspective, outside of their shared NASA conspiracies, that film and Capricorn One have little in common. Still, it is certainly worthy of note that the MOTW’s distrust of NASA anticipated the long-running conspiratorial doubt around the moon-landings, which would inspire a wealth of culture, leading all the way up to this year’s Fly Me to The Moon.

More than that prescience though, The Astronaut is remarkable for the way it fits so many divergent pieces—it is in turn a sci-fi, horror, romance and conspiracy movie—into one 70-minute package, creating a satisfying, thought-provoking whole. Truly out of this world.

(Sorry!)

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.