Life imitates art as sci-fi film prompts Nasa astronaut rescue plan
In the blockbuster movie Gravity, Sandra Bullock, playing a stranded astronaut, proclaims: ‘‘I hate space.’’ But future generations of space tourists may have kinder feelings toward Bullock.
The ground-breaking drama has not only earned Bullock her second Oscar nomination, in a race which reached its climax in Los Angeles last night, but has inspired the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as it prepares its first international plan to rescue astronauts lost in space.
The film is set in the near future when Bullock, playing a novice engineer, and her commander, played by George Clooney, are stranded 400 kilometres above Earth after debris destroys their shuttle.
Gravity is science fiction, but it highlights a real-life problem that faces space agencies as the number of private rockets heading into low Earth orbit doubles every year.
A potential boom in space tourism,
Sandra Bullock in While the film is science fiction, the issue of astronauts stranded in space is a real one. As the number of private rockets orbiting the Earth doubles each year, space agencies are developing a plan for rescuing passengers on these commercial flights. with the wealthy buying a spartan seat on a Russian Soyuz rocket, riding in a luxury balloon 160km up to ‘the big dark’, or rubbing shoulders with celebrities on board a Virgin Galactic spacecraft, means the prospect of hordes of hapless amateurs causing disasters in space has never been so great.
As the Apollo 13 mission proved in 1970, when the lunar capsule survived only after its crew fixed an exploded oxygen recycling system, astronauts are like ancient mariners – if something goes wrong, they are alone.
But in January, Nasa and other space experts from China and India gathered in Washington to discuss the first rulebook for a fast co-ordinated response rescue, if a rocket loses power or the crew become ill in near-Earth orbit.
Last year two American congresswomen, Eddie Bernice Johnson and Donna Edwards, said there should be a plan involving both the International Space Station and China’s smaller Tiangong-1 outpost – both of which feature in Gravity.
Current international agreements protect astronauts only if they crash to Earth, to ensure they are not regarded as invaders. But plans prepared last September by the Paris-based International Academy of Astronautics suggest that, as the US no longer has a shuttle, astronauts could be rescued by Russian or Chinese rockets – or the SpaceX Dragon built by Elon Musk, the LA-based entrepreneur, which is delivering cargo to the International Space Station.
This blueprint has now been accepted in principle by Nasa officials. A senior Nasa insider said last week: ‘‘ Gravity added a certain urgency to the discussions, because no-one wanted to be caught without a plan if the press or politicians asked.
‘‘Also, it makes sense. It’s an issue we can now deal with.
‘‘There are many details to come, but one thing I can tell you – I do not know anyone in Nasa who did not feel for Ms Bullock in Gravity. ‘‘It was painfully too close to home.’’ Bullock, 49, took the role only after Angelina Jolie dropped out. After an enduring career from Speed in 1994 through popular romantic comedies to sharper characters in Crash and her Oscar-winning turn in The Blind Side, she was listed as the world’s most highly paid actress in the 2012 Guinness World Records. Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity’s director, said he tried to make the film as scientifically accurate as possible – with a few liberties.
Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon, said he was ‘‘extravagantly impressed by the realistic portrayal of zero gravity.
‘‘And going through the space station was done just the way it’s done.’’
He encouraged all his former colleagues in Nasa to see it. Clearly they listened.