Great story, delivered in TV movie style, with many silly lapses

Rating: 6/10 (18 January 2017)

I had looked forward to this movie ever since hearing about it. I am a big space program buff, and delight in little-known stories being told.
There may be some spoilers in what I write below, so proceed with caution!
I did enjoy the movie while watching it, but was constantly taken out of the moment by the never ending stream of silly, sloppy mistakes. I have no problem with creative license and dramatizing stories for better results. But there were a LOT of real honkers throughout. I got the impression the everyone was so focused on the story that all the details went by without review or supervision.
I don't plan to write a comprehensive list of all that was wrong. But I will illustrate just a few things:

The inside of a Mercury capsule was barely larger than the astronaut. Yet the scenes inside the capsule looked like something on the accuracy level of "Plan 9 From Outer Space". Just throw a knob and a duct on a piece of gray plywood behind the astronaut and call it a day. And when entering the Mercury capsule, the threshold looks for all the world like it is made from a white painted window frame bought at Home Depot.

From day to day in the NASA parking lot, it looks like nothing changes...maybe all those engineers never moved their cars.

Sound effects and foley sounds throughout are often inappropriate or inaccurate, and for no good reason. I just don't think the film makers were trying in this regard. One example, the IBM computer room printer sounds like a completely different kind of printer...this is as jarring as seeing the jet in "Airplane" with the sound of a propeller plane in the soundtrack, but unlike that movie it is not funny.

When John Glenn's capsule is discovered to have possible heat shield issues, that concern (which did not last long) has time to be carried to the press,distributed to the public, and there is time for all of them to get all worked up over it and fret in front of TV sets. And when the engineers are fretting over the possibly loose heat shield, the female 'computer' (the focus of the story) chimes in authoritatively with some wisdom that she almost certainly could not have known....yes she was a brilliant mathematician and knew lots of things, but was she also suddenly a materials scientist, a spacecraft engineer with expertise in heat shields and re-entry physics, who would be the only one in the room full of experts who seemed to know anything about the matter at hand?

Apparently nobody on the film crew knows that the heat shield is on the bottom of the capsule, not the side.

Does this kind of thing ruin the movie? No, it does not. But if more attention had been paid these details this would have been a greater movie and not just a decent, feel-good, 'made for TV style' movie.