It also features the Air Force song, "Wild Blue Yonder", heard during the "Yeager's Triumph" sequence, and music composed by Henry Mancini for Kaufman's earlier film, The White Dawn (1974). In addition to "The Planets", the music score features other classical music pieces favored by Kaufman, such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Opus35. In the end, Kaufman and Conti compromised, using Conti's second score as the final score. which primarily used "The Planets" piece, under the condition that if Philip Kaufman used that portion of the score, he would have to credit Gustav Holst as the real composer. The third score written by Conti purely copied the film's temp track. MR-1 was eventually put on display at the Space Orientation Center of Marshall Space Flight Center.Īllegedly, Bill Conti wrote about three different scores for this film, the first consisting of his own original work, the second one featuring Gustav Holst's "The Planets" as inspiration. The rocket was recovered and although it was in good condition it never flew again. Flight director Chris Kraft made the call to just let the rocket sit until next the day when the batteries had drained and the liquid oxygen had boiled off. This left the rocket in a precarious condition: unanchored, fueled, with armed pyrotechnics, and with a parachute hanging down the side that - if the wind caught it - could have toppled the rocket. 2) It deployed the drogue chute for the recovery parachute (that is the "pop" seen in the film) 3) When not sensing any load on the main parachute, the rocket assumed the main parachute had failed and deployed the reserve. 1) It released the escape tower, that took off. The rocket then - dutifully - followed the correct procedure for a premature engine shutdown. Due to a cabling error, the umbilicals separated in the wrong order, leading to an electrical fault that shut down the engine. That is the Mercury-Redstone 1 launch failure, also known as "The four-inch flight".
The failure montage ends with a rocket that goes nowhere and just lets out a humorous "pop".