To look at her home in a new way for an art project, eight-year-old Maxine rides on a space shuttle, where she experiences the many thrills of takeoff and has the opportunity to indeed view her home, Earth, in an entirely new way.
Rocket engineer Jack Medaris, having failed in his attempt to build a machine that would travel to the moon and collect an isotope desperately needed to produce energy on Earth, and hoping to redeem himself for what he sees as a personal failure, highjacks the space shuttle Columbia and heads for the lunar surface.
The launch of the space shuttle Atlantis promises to be a historic event as it will be the first mission manned by American and Russian astronauts, but even as viewers are tuning in to watch the countdown, terrorists have taken over Cape Canaveral and it is up to Colonel "Iceberg" Friese to stop them.
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.
Rocket engineer Jack Medaris, having failed in his attempt to build a machine that would travel to the moon and collect an isotope desperately needed to produce energy on Earth, and hoping to redeem himself for what he sees as a personal failure, highjacks the space shuttle Columbia and heads for the lunar surface.
