Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview... a smart-aleck astronaut on Project Mercury. Out of dozens of candidates, Shepard was one of seven men chosen for NASA’s first attempt at manned space flight. Although he’s a dedicated military man with a long career as a Navy test pilot, Shepard is also something of a comedian, cad, and thrill-seeker. But once he and his colleagues are thrust into the public eye, he has to adjust to a whole new level of scrutiny.
Personality... funny, blunt, competitive, and temperamental. Shepard is the jokester of the Mercury team, regularly performing off-color impressions or trying to lighten the mood with a wisecrack. But he can also be moody and stand-offish when things don’t go his way. Like all of the Mercury astronauts, Shepard has to learn to sand down his rough edges for the media as they present him as one of America’s new heroes.
Get to Know him in...
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Tom Wolfe's book on the history of the U.S. Space program reads like a novel, and the film has that same fictional quality. It covers the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager to the Mercury 7 astronauts, showing that no one had a clue how to run a space program or how to select people to be in it. Thrilling, funny, charming and electrifying all at once.
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From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. "Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review) Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.
