Posted in: Disney+, National Geographic, Preview, streaming, Trailer, TV, YouTube | Tagged: astronauts, bleeding cool, comic-con@home, disney, disney plus, moon, Nat Geo, National Geographic, panel, preview, sdcc, space, teaser, The Right Stuff, trailer

The Right Stuff SDCC Panel Offers Disney+ Space Race Series Preview

Now, you know I love all things space, but the panel for The Right Stuff was fantastic, space nut or not. Astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison hosts the discussion with the cast and creators of the upcoming Disney+ series. The panel consists of actors Patrick J. Adams, Jake McDorman, Colin O'Donoghue, Michael Trotter, Aaron Staton, Micah Stock, James Lafferty, Nora Zehetner, Shannon Lucio, Eloise Mumford, Eric Ladin, and Patrick Fischler. They're joined by showrunner Mark Lafferty and executive producer Jennifer Davisson. The Right Stuff is a series based on the 1979 book of the same name and has previously been adapted into the 1983 film. It follows the early days of NASA and the Mercury space program, specifically "The Mercury Seven," aka the first crew of astronauts.

Based on the iconic bestseller by Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff" is an inspirational look at the early days of the U.S. Space Program and the incredible story of America's first astronauts, the Mercury Seven. At the height of the Cold War in 1959, the Soviet Union dominates the space race, and America fears it is a nation in decline. Newly-formed NASA has the monumental task of sending a man into space, and its engineers estimate they need decades to accomplish the feat. They are given two years.

Dubbed Project Mercury, the program recruits and trains just seven astronauts from a handful of the military's best pilots. Within days of being presented to the world, the Mercury Seven become instant celebrities, forged into heroes before they achieve a single heroic act. At a time when many wondered if America's glory days were behind it, The Right Stuff is an aspirational story about how ordinary human beings can achieve the extraordinary. As much about who we are today as it is about historic achievements, the series evokes the wonder of this singular era, when the free world looked towards a new horizon of hope as we first stepped off the bounds of our only home to venture into the vast unknown.

The series seems to take a very historically accurate approach to the very familiar story of the Mercury seven and their wives and lives, as each cast member looks astoundingly like their real-life counterparts. I'm curious to see how accurate this series is, and we have a first look clip from the panel showing us one of the many amusing anecdotes of the program and the series.

The National Geographic series The Right Stuff is coming exclusively to Disney+ this fall and though there have been many series and films about the early space program in America, this version promises to be different, according to Davisson: "Our hope was to tell a space story like one had never been told before. Where space was there and the innovation was there and the exploration was there and the excitement was there, but there was also real beating heart people behind it which you often don't see in shows that have to do with space."

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