How accurate is The Right Stuff movie? Gus Grissom's family had every reason to object

Much of it holds up: Chuck Yeager really did break the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying with ribs he'd cracked two days earlier, and the real Yeager served as a consultant and even took a cameo as a bartender.

But one astronaut's portrayal has been fought over for four decades — with good reason.

The Grissom problem

On July 21, 1961, Gus Grissom (played by Fred Ward) splashed down after America's second spaceflight. The hatch of his Liberty Bell 7 capsule blew prematurely, the spacecraft flooded and sank, and Grissom nearly drowned.

The film strongly implies he panicked and blew the hatch himself — the dreaded "screwed the pooch" scenario — and plays his post-flight career as a quiet disgrace.

Grissom insisted until his death that the hatch fired on its own. The movie sided with the doubt.

What the record actually shows

• NASA cleared him — the official review found no evidence Grissom triggered the hatch, and engineers identified plausible mechanical causes for an uncommanded firing.
• His hand told a story — astronauts who deliberately blew the explosive hatch, like Wally Schirra, came back with a bruised hand from the plunger. Grissom had no such injury.
• NASA kept trusting him — panicky washouts don't get promoted. Grissom commanded Gemini 3 in 1965, becoming the first NASA astronaut to fly in space twice.
• He was on track for the moon — Deke Slayton, who assigned the crews, later wrote that Grissom would likely have been his choice for the first lunar landing.

Grissom never got that chance. He died on January 27, 1967, alongside Ed White and Roger Chaffee, in the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire — commanding NASA's most important mission at the time of his death.

What the astronauts thought of the film

Not much, in Grissom's case. His fellow Mercury pilots defended him for decades, and Schirra was openly contemptuous of the movie as a whole:

Schirra famously dismissed The Right Stuff as "Animal House in space."

Did the recovered capsule settle it?

Not quite. Liberty Bell 7 was raised from three miles down in the Atlantic in 1999 — 38 years after it sank — but the hatch was never found, so no final forensic verdict was possible. What the recovery didn't produce is just as telling: nothing that implicated Grissom.

For the record: the film ends with the Mercury program triumphant. The real vindication came later, spelled out in bronze and named Grissom — on schools, an Air Force base, and a crater on the moon he never reached.