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Comment by montenegrohugo | Hacker News Reader

Expect to see stuff like this become more and more "normal" in the future, thanks to access to space becoming drastically cheaper. Falcon 9/Dragon seats are now available for civilian purchase, as well as license to stay on the ISS.

Some examples: Axiom Space [1] plans to send three private passengers to the ISS on 2021, as well as adding their own commercial modules to the ISS. Tom Cruise seems pretty set on filming his next movie in space too [2].

Furthermore, if the Starship [3] project is successful, space is going to become _cheap_, perhaps even to the point that anyone in the upper middle class might be able to purchase a ride.

Exciting times.

[1] https://www.axiomspace.com/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/5/21248460/nasa-tom-cruise-m...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

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I feel like shooting a movie in space would make for very good marketing but rather boring footage. Very cramped quarters, very drastic security measures would probably make for rather unimpressive footage compared to what's usually achieved through CGI. Space is big, space is slow, space is quiet. It will be quite an interesting challenge to make it look visually interesting in an action movie I think.

Although I suppose that watching the movie knowing that it was actually shot in space will be novelty enough to keep the audience captivated, but that'll only work for the first few movies going through the hassle of doing it, then the novelty will wear off and I expect that at that point people will be back to using much cheaper, simple and flexible CGI.

All scientific realism and other criticisms aside—I thought Gravity did a pretty good job with essentially what you described as the setting of the film.

Mostly spent focusing on pretty cramped quarters in a capsule. They figured out some ways to introduce drama. I think what might be the most stunning would be some of the exterior footage. I wonder whether that would introduce some sort of barrier-breaking in the mind when watching a film taking place above the earth knowing that the earth in the film is real footage in "real time" and not stock or CGI.

Suspension of disbelief failed when main character reached station with wildly different orientations with almost no delta-v in a stupidly short amount of time.

That's a fair point, but I think zero gravity + green screens will be a really unique opportunity that is hard to replicate anywhere else but space. You can do things you can't in a studio.

> Axiom Space [1] plans to send three private passengers to the ISS on 2021, as well as adding their own commercial modules to the ISS.

I just love when a super expensive taxpayer-funded space station (which is apparently also inefficient at science/$) gets used to make rich people richer.

If that gets you riled up, just wait until you hear how much commercial freight is transported over the interstates!

If you had bothered to do any research before posting this, you'd have found that the private passengers will pay $33,750 per night to be there, plus $105 each day per bag stowed, $42/kwh for power, and $50/gb for internet.

https://www.nasa.gov/leo-economy/commercial-use/pricing-poli...

$50/GB is less than some cellular overage fees.

I'd love to see the agreement that allows a movie to be shot in space. If they were to pay for the seats directly, it would be too much of the movie's budget.

Regardless, love to see it happen.

Just wondering, when you think _cheap_, what does that mean? 5 digits? 6 digits?

This has almost nothing to do with the post.

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