Welcome to Anime-land, where cute girls can do anything in a bid to make that anything more engaging… even if that anything was already something really engaging like being an astronaut.
In this show, we follow Yukari Morita, a spunky teen girl who has decided to spend her summer vacation trekking out to the Solomon Islands in search of her disappeared dad, who vanished during his honeymoon with her mom there. Shortly after arriving, Yukari gets caught up in an escape attempt by the current astronaut candidate of the Solomon Space Agency, who rightly fears for his life with the mad scientists desperately attempting to cut weight for their Mercury-style capsule while simultaneously exploding plenty of test launches. He and Yukari get out of the mess in part because the Space Agency group notices that Yukari, as a teen girl, weighs a lot less than an adult man. They offer her a job “so easy a monkey could do it” in exchange for offering to help search for Yukari’s missing dad.
Thus, it’s eventually revealed what Yukari’s job actually is and she begins training that looks an awful lot like dealing with a sadistic mad scientist, plus wilderness survival and marksmanship because that’s going to be a big help in space, right? On one such training operation, however, Yukari ends up in the local tribal village. Here, she finds her dad, who it turns out is just kind of a deadbeat living as tribe chief with several wives and a half-sister for Yukari who’s almost her same age. This is Matsuri, and when the space agency swings by to pick Yukari up, they go ahead and add another teenage girl to their astronaut roster.
We then get some time of Yukari, who has a temper that would be “tsundere” if she had a love interest, not getting along with Matsuri or the space agency folks, pretty much sour and meaning to wait out her one launch so she can drag her dad back to Japan, at gunpoint if necessary. Eventually, after a couple zany plans and several screaming matches with the director, engineer, or mad scientist of the lot, Yukari is scheduled to go up.
After some trouble with the launch window, takeoff is fine, but her capsule has some issues once it’s in orbit, leaving her essentially stranded. This leads to an emergency launch where Matsuri is sent up to save Yukari, rendezvousing in orbit and then having to make a harrowing re-entry.
While this is going on, Yukari does at least get a couple chances to admire space, which will end up spurring her to keep on after her required flight.
The two end up splashing down in the pool of Yukari’s school. There, they enlist the assistance of the meek and nerdy Akane Miura, who has come to admire Akari for doing such an impressive thing. Yukari says some inspiring words to Akane, and even invites her to come and visit and get a tour of the space center.
However, when Akane gets suspended for leaving class for even this big deal sort of thing, she decides to visit the Solomon Islands sooner than Yukari had expected… and with her objective being to enroll as an astronaut rather than just taking a tour of the facility. Once we get through the bit where Yukari has to decide if she’s staying or going (she stays, of course) there’s just one problem with Akane as an astronaut: her level of physical fitness and ability is far below spec.
We spend some time worrying about if Akane can make the cut, ending with her having the same sort of wilerness survival test that Yukari basically bypassed by landing in the tribal village and finding her dad, and Akane just manages to drag herself across the finish line to be considered a new astronaut candidate.
This turns out to be in something of the nick of time, as NASA soon has a problem that the Solomon Space Agency can step up to help with: A probe being deployed from the space shuttle has had a mechanical problem, and a part is stuck inside where the NASA astronauts can’t reach. Solomon’s teen girls (and skin-tight space suits. More on that later) however, have a reasonable chance to retrieve the part and fix the probe, ensuring that a decades-long scientific dream is actually fulfilled. It’s decided that Yukari (who has the best space experience) and Akane (who actually knows enough about delicate machinery to be useful) will go up and rendezvous with NASA to do the fix.
Most of the NASA astronauts are pretty welcoming, but one is a bit more gruff, somewhat echoing Yukari herself. All the same, Akane manages to pull a fairly impressive stunt (getting deep into the probe and retrieving the item on one breath because she had to disconnect her backpack to fit), but it seems like their work might be for naught as while the NASA crew is putting the probe back together, its engine fires a burst, launching it into a higher orbit.
Rather than deciding this thing is cursed, Yukari and Akane resolve on a somewhat risky plan where, because neither vehicle has enough fuel to reach high orbit and return on its own, the shuttle and the Solomon Space Agency pod will perform a two-stage boost in order to rendezvous with the wayward probe, allowing Akane to fix it for good.
The real hazard of this, however, is the return: coming in from a higher orbit means with more speed, and the stress might be too much for the capsule. NASA and the Solomon Space Agency both scramble and come up with a flight path that should return them safely, but the conditions mean that Yukari’s going to have to make manual adjustments while de-orbiting, making for some fancy flying she does to come home safely. Once the capsule is back, though, the show decides it’s had enough, and we leave our three teen girl astronauts to their presumable career.
Before I get into the verdict part, one might notice that this summary is a little… short, compared to my normal fare. Rocket Girls is a full twelve-episode anime, and things do happen in it (quite a lot of things) but it doesn’t lend itself to a meaty summary because most of it is actually kind of slice of life material. We’re concerned, episode in and out, with what tests Yukari is going through, what the current problem with the rocket or launch window is, or how one of the side characters is doing. Yukari only flies two missions, and they’re kind of back-loaded in terms of the run time of the show.
But that’s okay. Because, despite a premise that sounds as out there as Girls und Panzer, Rocket Girls is actually a fairly grounded take. Some of what it says and does is silly, but more of it is actually a not bad picture, all things considered, of the infancy of a space program, reminiscent of The Right Stuff and other accounts of the pre-Apollo NASA flights like Mercury and Gemini.
This is woven in with a small number of fairly realistic seeming science fiction elements. The mad scientist devises a new rocket fuel that, at least loaded right, burns in such a way that the inner layers go first, allowing a cut on weight in the solid rocket. To my knowledge this isn’t something that exists or that there’s even plausible science on, but the way its presented is quite believable.
The skin-tight spacesuits are a different matter. While probably chosen because cute girls are going to look better in the form-fitting getups than the traditional space suits, Skin-tight suits, as mechanical counterpressure suits, are actually a current topic of research, since they have quite a few benefits over the modern bulky, pressurized suits including lighter weight, better mobility, and something of more natural thermoregulation.
Everything is angled to make this look and feel like something that could really happen. Sure, some of the characters are insane: most of the Solomon Space Agency adults are some kind of crazy (the chief engineer being a possible exception), to say nothing of Yukari’s father, but at the same time the conclusions they reach feel natural. Yukari, Matsuri, and Akane are loud personalities as well, but while they play for comedy rather well at times, they seldom feel like they’re forced character types.
As this sort of odd little Slice of Life adventure, I think Rocket Girls holds up to watch… but possibly not to remember. It is different than typical anime fare in how surprisingly grounded it is while still being a somewhat outrageous concept. But, at the same time, the fact that we spend time training, debating over diets, doing more training, dealing with the fact that mom is shockingly okay with this, bug fixing a rocket before launch, and all the other mundane stuff that’s made interesting here – it’s going to wear on some viewers who just want to see cool space stuff rather than necessarily having it be special and momentous (which the show goes for, but might fall a little short from given how heavy Yukari’s first flight is on the crisis aspect).
All in all, I find that Rocket Girls is worth a B-; a respectable grade that brings with it a fair recommendation for anyone feeling vaguely in the mood.