National Geographic is counting down to the launch of “The Right Stuff,” the epic new series based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the Space Race that will now debut on Disney+ on October 9.
The first trailer for the series is the sort of inspiring, patriotic stuff dreams are made of, in which a Life Magazine pitchman tells the Mercury 7 why what they’re doing now will be remembered forever.
“Nobody has ever seen anybody like you men, until now,” he says. “Few things live forever in the soul of a country. You’re heroes.”
Patrick J. Adams, Jake McDorman, Colin O’Donoghue, James Lafferty, Aaron Staton, Michael Trotter and Micah Stock star as America’s first astronauts in “The Right Stuff” series, which is an eight-episode take on the early days of the U.S. space program and the first time we’ve seen this story brought to the screen since Philip Kaufman’s sprawling film “The Right Stuff” from 1983.
The series is set at the height of the Cold War in 1959 as the U.S. hopes to beat the Soviet Union in the space race by being the first to put a man in space with only two years to complete their task. NASA engineers, including rocket scientist Bob Gilruth (Patrick Fischler) and the passionate Chris Kraft (Eric Ladin), work against the clock under mounting pressure from Washington. Together, they hand select seven astronauts from a pool of military test pilots. These are ordinary men, including Major John Glenn and Alan Shepard, plucked from obscurity, and within days of being presented to the world, they are forged into heroes before they achieve a single heroic act.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way and Warner Bros. Television produced “The Right Stuff” for Nat Geo. Showrunner Mark Lafferty (“Castle Rock,” “Halt and Catch Fire”) also serves as an executive producer along with Appian Way’s Jennifer Davisson and DiCaprio.
The series debuts on Oct. 9 with a two-episode premiere. Watch the first trailer above.
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