Space Cowboys
When a retired engineer is called upon to rescue a failing satellite, he insists that his equally old teammates accompany him into space.
- Director:Clint Eastwood
- Genre:Adventure / Comedy / Drama / Sci-Fi / Thriller
- Runtime:125 minutes
Cast
Clint Eastwood : Frank Corvin
Tommy Lee Jones : Hawk Hawkins
Donald Sutherland: Jerry O’Neill
James Garner : Tank Sullivan
James Cromwell : Bob Gerson
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An obsolete Soviet communications satellite is about to fall out of orbit, and NASA agrees to deal with it. The onboard systems are so archaic that nobody at NASA understands them, so they ask retired United States Air Force pilot and electrical engineer Dr. Frank Corvin (Eastwood), who designed the original guidance systems from which the satellite has been copied, to help them, despite the longstanding animosity between the engineer and project director Bob Gerson (James Cromwell). A flashback reveals that 40 years ago, Corvin’s prospects as an astronaut were dashed with the formation of NASA, a civilian agency. Corvin and his three-man team were replaced by a chimp which was a shrewd move calculated by Gerson.
Corvin insists that there is not enough time to train anybody; he proposes going himself, and he will not go without his old team, team Daedalus: Jerry O’Neill (Sutherland), a skirt-chasing structural engineer who designs roller coasters; hot dog former Air Force pilot-turned crop duster William ‘Hawk’ Hawkins (Jones); and former navigator ‘Tank’ Sullivan (Garner), who is now a family man and Baptist minister. With no choice, the director agrees, intending to string Corvin along until younger astronauts are up to speed on the system. But the press soon learns of the situation, and the four men become celebrities – even appearing on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. They become so popular that Gerson is forced to actually send them on the mission by the Vice President. During medical tests, Hawk is found to have terminal pancreatic cancer, and has only about eight months left to live. Due to the urgent nature of the mission and since he won’t be impaired, he is considered as flightworthy and put on the mission.
The mission goes ahead with two crews, old and new, flying the space shuttle Daedalus. When they capture the satellite, they discover that it is not what they thought it was. Instead, it is a dangerous relic of the Cold War, armed with nuclear missiles. The team also learns that the system the satellite uses (from SkyLab) was stolen by the KGB from Gerson’s personal files. The team decides to use the payload-assist rockets that the Daedalus is carrying in order to push the satellite out of Earth orbit into deep space. Read more
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