THESE are the three best pilots they can find??? (Spoilers)
Much of this film -- too much -- is taken up by the extensive, intense, nationwide search they conduct to find the three best pilots in America to be launched into space to capture a meteor, all solemnly described in Herbert Marshall's narration. (An idiotic expedition, by the way, but then this is 1954.)
So -- who do they winnow it down to? (1) An aggressive, macho jerk full of himself who won't listen to anybody and thinks he can do it all, and who of course ends up disobeying orders out of arrogance and blows up in space. (2) A weak, obviously emotionally unbalanced loser who flips out because his selfish, two-timing girlfriend blows him off, then predictably cracks under pressure, becomes delusional, floats out of his recliner and shoots himself out into deep space forever. (3) Okay: they get one placid, even-tempered, sensible guy who naturally is the only one who succeeds in his mission, then bravely crash-lands and gets both the meteor and the girl.
THIS is the best they could do? One out of three? If these guys represent the three top fliers in the country then no one had better board an airliner or hire a crop duster because the pilots must certainly be psychotics! And disband the Air Force while you're at it -- safer to keep them on the ground!
Fakest rocketships I've ever seen -- they look like baking-soda-powered plastic torpedoes you'd fire from a toy sub in a bathtub.
Cool scene when the macho guy's skeleton in his cracked space helmet drifts by Richard Carlson's viewscreen, though.