The true events behind the NatGeo series The Right Stuff, premiering October 9 

National Geographic’s documentary series The Right Stuff is premiereing on Disney+ Hotstar on October 9. The series, executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, explores the earliest NASA mission and mankind’s first-ever venture into space.

Here’s all you need to know about the show before launch:

• A gravity-defying story, The Right Stuff shuttles into the realities of one of the first-ever missions of NASA. At its early stages, when just six months old in 1959, NASA chose a team for an incredible project that would change the scope of space and man’s travel into the depths of the worlds beyond our own. 

• It is based on the bestselling book by Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff. The book extensively captured the true stories of the pilots engaged in the Project Mercury Mission. Wolfe had interviewed test pilots, the astronauts, and their wives to unearth the stories and the missions’ challenges. 

• The series is a TV adaptation of the 1983 movie of the same name.

• The eight-episode season, an adaptation of the 1983 movie The Right Stuff by Philip Kauffman, is an inspirational look at the early days of the US Space Program and the iconic story of America’s first astronauts, the Mercury 7. 

• It is based on NASA’s Project Mercury.

• The mission Project Mercury was a NASA program that launched the first Americans into space. Seven astronauts were chosen for the mission and they were called the ‘Mercury 7’. These seven original American astronauts were Alan Shepard, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, and Deke Slayton. 

• Played by Jake McDorman in the series, Alan Shephard was the first American to enter space in 1961. He named his spacecraft Freedom 7. The 15-minute flight went into space and came back down. Ten years later, Shepard also journeyed to the Moon as the commander of Apollo 14. 

• The Mercury 7 flew separate space crafts.

• Gus Grissom was the second astronaut, after Shephard to fly in Project Mercury followed by John Glenn who was the first American to orbit Earth in his spacecraft Friendship 7. Scott Carpenter later flew on Aurora 7 with Wally Schirra taking up the mission next, on his Sigma 7. Gordon Cooper flew on the last Mercury mission where he spent 34 hours circling Earth in his capsule, Faith 7. Deke Slayton was part of the Project Mercury astronauts but had to fly on a separate mission in 1975 owing to his poor health. 

• There were other test flights to make the Project Mercury mission safer. A rhesus monkey, Sam, and two chimpanzees, Ham and Enos, flew in Mercury capsules to make the  Mercury 7’s mission safer. NASA had developed flights prior to the mission to ensure the basic safety measures were covered so that they could launch man into space with the mission. This was the first lesson in learning how to enable orbiting the universe and flying a spacecraft.