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Movies in Space?
Pentapod writes: "Surely this must have been submitted ... but I haven't seen it yet. A new module being planned on the International Space Station will include facilities for the first film studio in space. Angelina Jolie in zero-gravity, anyone?" And it's even named Enterprise, not for its bold, pioneering spirit, but for its commercial nature. *shrug* My guess is that it's cheaper to float your actors with special effects than to send them up and shoot them in real zero gravity.
NASA, I recall is up for it, but expressed the desire to hold of on more tourism for a while. Cameron agreed. (He could probably fund the damned module anyway....)
While it worked (the zero-g scenes are wonderful -- of corse I think the whole movie is), it was costly, and difficult.
The Apollo 13 crew has logged more vomit-comet time then any astronaut. More then anyone other then the people that fly the thing. That wasn't cheep (I don't know if the film company payed, or if it was done on our tax dollars).
You only get about 30 seconds of zero-g at once. That makes it hard to film long scenes. No, it makes it hard to film short ones, really really hard for long ones :-)
There is very little space to film there. The set on 13 was of a cramped space craft, so it wasn't impossible to film, but it was hard to fit cameras and lights in.
I'm sure there is some other stuff as well, but it has been a while since I watched the film, and even longer since I listened to the directors commentary...
Hm..The debate seems to be the usefulness of an orbital studio. Considering leading man/leading lady salaries today, paying the soviet space agency one million dollars per head to get a director, photographer + two actors into the "studio" for a week's worth of filming is
The novelty factor is remarkably high. But don't tell me that had Ron Howard, Tom Hanks & Co. shot 30 minutes worth of capsule interiors in the studio that it WOULDN'T have added value to the film. People admire Hank's dedication to his craft when he loses 35 pounds for films like "Castaway" or "Philadelphia"; The pure accuracy of the visuals in a zero-g filmed movie with a cast like that would transcend gadget value, and fall welllllll within today's bloated A-movie budgets.
So Lou Perlman wants to put Superflous Bubblegum Band v2.0 into orbit for a live concert? To haul up 4 prettyboys + camera guy = 5.5, 6 million dollars? Ten million households pay $29 for the pay-per-view, and after it's all said and done - Hey, he still made a ton of money off pure gadget value.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
If you read the article, you'd see that the module is a proposed attachment to the ISS, which Russia has 'handballed' to a civilian group. Russia ran out of money (again).
NASA is on record as 'reviewing the situation', as are all the other ISS partner nations. I think NASA will be objecting as strongly to this as they did to our recent Space Tourist.
Sufficient to say, it's not a NASA initiative, and NASA hasn't even made an official comment yet.
Using the holy grail of OSes...
Check out Pen (from Pen and Teller) and a dude from ZZTop they were the first to try the new commercial version of the Vomit Comet!
You get fifteen 30 second zero-G dives as well as 15 1.8g climbs! They even start you off with a 2/3g dive (Mars) and 1/3g dive (Moon)...plus it's in a freakin' cavernous jet!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
There is a long article by Penn Jillette (the talking half of Penn and Teller) here. More than just an article on the technology, it talks about how it really feels far better than anything I've seen before.
Besides, it involves fat guys and pneumatic blondes stripping in zero-g along with Billy from ZZ top and a $250,000 guitar - if that doesn't appeal to nerds, I don't know what does.
Yup, it's been done... The movie was called "The Uranus Experiment", and it was released in 1999! Here's an article about it...
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
As a former Boeing Space Station engineer, I am stunned and appalled that SpaceHab would stoop to this - leasing a module as a movie set. To get the obvious out of the way, there aren't enough scenes needing zero G in sci-fi dramas to justify it, which leaves sports and sex as the only things that would keep people's attention for continuing and repeated use. My God, we're on the verge of seeing the dawn of the 24-hour weightless smut channel, just when I thought I had seen everything...
What's even worse is that the real rationale for the Space Station is virtually dead, if it's not totally dead already. The ONLY reason for the space station is to do life science in zero G (or reduced G, like growing plants in a Martian level centrifuge) - EVERYTHING else (earth resources photography, astronomical observations, you name it) is going to be done cheaper and better from unmanned platforms that don't have the expense of an extraneous life support system.
The Space Station is SO big that the current crew of three is run ragged trying to keep the systems maintenance going - there is NO TIME for ANY life science at present. That won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle. (If modifying a hollow can of air into a movie studio costs $100M, you can imagine what a new reentry vehicle with heat shielding, comm, nav, propulsion and all the rest would cost, starting from scratch...)
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.