The film was directed by John Sturges, a former specialist in Westerns such as Bad Day at Black Rock (1956), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). In the 1960s with the growing decline of the Western, Sturges had started to move away from Westerns toward what would today be called the techno-thriller, with the likes of the biowarfare thriller The Satan Bug (1965) and the big-budget Ice Station Zebra (1968), before culminating in this.

The film bristles with a determined realism – the launch sequences are highly convincing, you are never sure if what you are seeing is real or special effects. Sturges builds suspense well and the film moves with quite a degree of dramatic urgency, being particularly gripping when it comes to the mounting hopes and possibilities during the launch in the middle of the hurricane. Unfortunately dialogue often seems more or less like densely technical recitations from textbook, against which the human elements seem almost an afterthought. It is certainly well cast and everyone fills their one-dimensional roles well, with the exception of Gregory Peck who spends the entire film with no facial change other than a vaguely troubled frown. The special effects work is decent, particularly the scenes of the capsules and astronauts in orbit, although the appearance of the rescue capsule at the end does show exactly what a difference that motion control cameras have made to filmmaking since. Like Robert Altman’s Countdown (1968) the year before, this ends on the somewhat Utopian wish fulfillment of the Space Race being able to be resolved on a note of East-West cooperation. Not too bad a film at all.

The film was based on a 1964 novel by Martin Caidin. Caidin was a pilot who ran an aerospace consultancy firm and wrote a number of fiction and non-fiction books. The work he was most famous for was the novel Cyborg (1972), which became the basis of the tv series The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-8).