NO-BERTSpace facts: even though the "official" name of the ISS' second treadmill is "COLBERT" (for "Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill,") no one outside of perhaps NASA's Public Affairs Office uses that designation. With LIFE, Fong faced a particularly thorny challenge: balancing the contradictory goals of realism and entertainment. Fong is somewhat of a medical renaissance man-a London anesthesiologist who moonlights riding around in helicopters as an emergency doctor and who trained in space medicine for a decade at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kevin Fong (who is also featured in the exclusive clip up at the top of the page). Schmidt noted that all of these issues can be overcome, but they are all unknowns today. If it doesn’t reach a perfect orbit, it’s a disaster.” And the vehicle must be able to compensate during liftoff this misalignment from imperfect orientation because it must reach a very specific orbit to return back to the Earth. It can be tilted to the left-it can be tilted to any direction. “Number one, there is an atmosphere, which has an aerodynamic impact on the design of the vehicle that lifts off… Secondly, you cannot predict in which conditions the return vehicle will have landed. Schmidt continued, outlining the difficulty of getting off of Mars. We were excited to talk with him, and questions about scientific accuracy topped our list. ![]() Schmidt was one of the scientists hired by SKYDANCE as consultants on the film, and his focus was space engineering and the “correctness” of living and working in space. First up was retired European Space Agency Project Manager Rudolph “Rudi” Schmidt, who worked on a number of important ESA missions, including Mars Express, Venus Express, and Gaia (space industry protip: “ESA” is pronounced “ee'-suh,” not “E-S-A”). We had an opportunity to sit down with a couple of the movie’s science advisors to talk about what the film is and isn’t. LIFE takes the formula in a bit of a different direction, though, since according to the movie’s second trailer, it’s set not in the far future or even the near future but in the present day. It’s a tried and true formula, explosively popularized by Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece Alien and echoed with varying degrees of success by multiple films in every decade since. Because, of course, that single cell of life quickly transforms into a space monster and starts killing people. The visuals of a crew working on and in a near-future International Space Station had that same feeling of verisimilitude that made Gravity so compelling to watch-but the movie’s premise seemed to undermine the visuals’ attempts at accuracy. In the film-due in theaters on March 24-a six-person crew of scientists and astronauts aboard a souped-up movie version of the International Space Station intercept a Mars sample return probe on examination, the probe appears to have brought back at least one viable cell of life from the surface of Mars. We’ve had our eye on LIFE ever since the first trailer dropped back in October. ![]() ![]() Video courtesy of SKYDANCE/Columbia Pictures.
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