by Scott Kelly recently returned to the International Space Station — during a trip to Berlin.
The first American astronaut to spend more than 500 days off the planet, including nearly a year aboard the space station during his fourth and final space flight in 2016, Kelly was in Germany when he took off back in his exotic home away from home.
“The outside was just plywood, but the inside looked better than the space station training model we have at Johnson Space Center,” Kelly said in an interview with collectSPACE. “Well, not functionally, but look-wise it looked a lot more like the real thing.”
“But then, the one at NASA was designed for different things,” he said.
The almost full-scale space station was built by Studio Babelberg to film the extraterrestrial scenes in “Starship”, the new psychological thriller now airing on Apple TV +. The production spent five weeks on the space station shooting sequences set within the microgravity environment of the orbiting laboratory, including a mysterious accident that inspires the main storyline of the series.
“They wanted it to look real,” Kelly said. “I tried to put a lot of junk in them, like cables and boxes and power supplies, and they did as much of that as they could. They even put food and coffee stains on the walls, like on the space. station, trying to make it as realistic as possible.”
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Space boot camp
In addition to being a consultant to the production team, Kelly met with the actors portraying astronauts to ensure that their performances were as true to life as possible.
“We had space bootcamp sessions,” he said. “We had some Zoom calls and then we had some meetings as a group in Berlin, and then I had individual conversations with them.”
The “Cast” cast includes Noomi Rapace, who plays Swedish astronaut Johanna “Jo” Ericsson with the European Space Agency (ESA); William Catlett as Paul Lancaster, the NASA astronaut in charge of the expedition; Henry David as Russian cosmonaut Ilya Andreev; Sandra Tele as Yazmina Suri, an ESA astronaut; and Carole Weyers as French astronaut Audrey Brostin.
Simulating weightlessness was a challenge and required skills from set design to cinematography, stunts and special effects. As well as using in-camera techniques to capture the actors’ freedom of movement, the cast (and their stunt team) were attached to an elaborate wire harness system.
“I’ve done that for one commercial hour, but for a short time, and it’s not easy,” said Kelly. “It’s uncomfortable, it’s painful.”
After speaking with Garrett Reisman, another former NASA astronaut and technical advisor for another space-themed Apple TV+ series, “For All Mankind,” Kelly took a level-headed approach to advising the “Stars” team “.
“The things that were in the highest category were things that you didn’t want to mess with. Like one episode, I was watching Noomi in a scene on the space station where she was almost about to cry. And it was I’m like, ‘Don’t let that tear drop!’ and so they cut her out. That’s the kind of thing you didn’t want to see on screen.”
(Without the pull of gravity, tears don’t roll down astronauts’ cheeks like they do on Earth. Instead, surface tension keeps them rising around the eyes.)
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“Then there was the middle category – they should fix this, but if they don’t, I’m not going to be heartbroken. And then there was the stuff that was minor, little details that nobody was going to notice. d tell them, ‘If you want this to be right, this is what it is, but nobody’s going to care.'”
“Sure, people changing the direction of the middle of the module without using an opposing force on something, as if they were on a jetpack, that was the worst,” said Kelly.
Watching with us
Although he worked on it, it was the first time Kelly watched “Constellation” as it was on Apple TV+. The first three episodes began streaming last week, with the fourth premiering on Wednesday (February 28).
His first impression of the series is that it is “great.”
“Especially the space stuff,” Kelly said. “Obviously I’m a little biased since that was the part I worked on, but I think some of the best pictures of life on the space station that I’ve seen. The other thing – well, I get it. It can be a little hard to follow, but I think it will pick up as you get further into the story.”
Kelly doesn’t make a cameo, although his daughter thought she hit on a familiar or family theme.
“My daughter texted me, ‘Wait a minute, are those two guys bald [Henry and Bud Caldera, as played by Jonathan Banks] a few astronauts?” And I replied, ‘Do you want me to tell you?’ She didn’t want me to tell her,” said Kelly, whose twin brother Mark was also a NASA astronaut before being elected to the US Senate to represent the state of Arizona.
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As for the show using the real space station to set up a suspense thriller, Kelly thought it was a natural connection.
“I think it’s just people’s natural tendency to be afraid of things they don’t understand much about or things that are dark and unsettling, as you would imagine a space to be,” Kelly said. “There’s definitely a lot of risk involved and it’s dangerous, so it kind of makes sense.”
“But that can be funny too,” he said. “One of my neighbors texted me upset: ‘Why didn’t you tell me not to watch that right before bed? Now I can’t sleep.'”
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