| Director | Lewis Gilbert |
|---|---|
| Budget | $34 million |
| Box office | $210.3 million |
A Drax Industries Moonraker Space Shuttle orbiter on loan to the United Kingdom is hijacked in midair while on a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. The carrier is destroyed but no wreckage of the shuttle is found. M, head of MI6, assigns James Bond, Agent 007, to investigate. En route to England, Bond is attacked and thrown out of a plane by assassin Jaws. He survives by stealing a parachute from the pilot, while Jaws lands on a trapeze net within a circus tent. At the Drax Industries spaceplane-manufacturing complex in California, Bond meets the owner of the company, Hugo Drax, and his henchman Chang. Bond also meets Dr. Holly Goodhead, an astronaut, and survives an assassination attempt while inside a centrifuge chamber. Drax's personal pilot, Corinne Dufour, helps Bond find blueprints for a glass vial made in Venice. Drax discovers her betrayal and has her chased down and killed by his Beauceron hounds.
In Venice, Bond encounters Goodhead and observes her sneaking around a door near the glass factory and is then chased through the canals by Drax's henchmen. He returns to the factory at night to investigate and discovers a secret biological laboratory and learns that the glass vials are to hold a nerve gas deadly to humans, but harmless to plants and animals. Chang attacks Bond, but Bond throws him through the stained glass clockface of the Saint Mark's clocktower, killing him; during the fight, Bond finds evidence that Drax is moving his operation to Rio de Janeiro. Rejoining Goodhead he sleeps with her having revealed that he has deduced that she is a CIA agent spying on Drax. Bond has saved one of the vials he found earlier, as the only evidence of the now missing laboratory; he gives it to M for analysis, who permits him to go to Rio de Janeiro under the pretense of being on leave.
Bond survives attacks by Jaws (Chang's replacement) during Rio Carnival and on the Sugarloaf Cable Car at Sugarloaf Mountain. After Jaws' cable car crashes, he is rescued from the rubble by Dolly, a young woman, and the two fall in love. Drax's forces capture Goodhead, but Bond escapes; he learns that the toxin comes from a rare orchid indigenous to the Amazon jungle. Bond travels the Amazon River and comes under attack from Drax's forces, before eventually locating his base. Captured by Jaws, Bond is taken to Drax and witnesses four Moonraker shuttles lifting off. Drax explains that he stole back the loaned Shuttle because another in his fleet had developed a fault during assembly. Bond and Goodhead are locked in a room under the launch platform, and narrowly escape being incinerated by the exhausts of Moonraker 5, which is carrying Drax, and then pose as pilots on Moonraker 6. The shuttles dock with Drax's space station, hidden from radar by a cloaking device.
Bond and Goodhead disable the radar jamming cloaking device; the United States military sends a company of space marines aboard another shuttle to intercept the now-visible space station. Jaws captures Bond and Goodhead, to whom Drax reveals his plan to destroy humanity by launching fifty globes that would disperse the nerve gas into Earth's atmosphere. Drax had transported several dozen genetically perfect young men and women of varying races to the space station in the shuttles. They would live there until Earth was safe again for human life, with their descendants being a "new master race". Bond persuades Jaws to switch his allegiance by getting Drax to admit that anyone not measuring up to his physical standards, including Jaws and Dolly, would be exterminated. Jaws attacks Drax's guards, and a laser battle ensues between Drax's forces and Bond, Jaws, and the Marines. Drax's forces are defeated as the station is destroyed, while Bond shoots and ejects Drax into space. Bond and Goodhead use Drax's laser-armed Moonraker 5 to destroy the three launched globes and return to Earth. Jaws and Dolly, who ejected themselves in one of Drax's escape pods, are recovered by the Marines. Bond's superiors get a video feed of Moonraker 5 and are shocked to see Bond and Goodhead having sex in zero gravity.