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For some within the house group, it sounded just like the rehash of an previous rumor: “Tom Cruise Plots Movie To Shoot In Space…” learn the headline of a Deadline Hollywood article revealed final month.
The “unique”—all three paragraphs of it—was quick on particulars, however the point out of Cruise and house was all that was wanted for different publications to wish to run with the story and for social media to gentle up with the information.
However this was not the primary time that had occurred.
4 years in the past, virtually to the day, a British tabloid claimed that Cruise had been coaching for a flight on the house shuttle and will have been among the many astronauts who died on board the orbiter Columbia in 2003. The Each day Star’s report of the actor’s earlier “top secret mission” rapidly unfold throughout the Net till NASA stepped in and quashed the story.
Whether or not spurred on by that little bit of “fake news” or Cruise’s monitor document of attempting to prime his personal daring stunts in every of his hit motion motion pictures, one other rumor started gaining traction in 2018 that the subsequent installment in Cruise’s Mission: Inconceivable franchise can be what lastly despatched him off the planet. “He’s not going to space, nor does he need to go to space,” Director Christopher McQuarrie informed Empire in February of this yr.
So in gentle of that precedent, it was a little bit of a shock when the top of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, took to Twitter the day after that Deadline report to verify the news: “NASA is excited to work with Tom Cruise on a film aboard the International Space Station!” he wrote.
Why is the concept of filming in house any completely different this time round? Simply when the 2018 rumors concerning the subsequent Mission: Inconceivable film had been beginning to make the rounds, Cruise himself defined why the idea of an actor going into house was an issue.
“It is the mechanics of getting it there,” Cruise stated in an August 2018 interview with Collider. “How do you construct a sequence there, and the way lengthy can we now have that sequence? As a result of if I went up … how do you place that into the construction of a screenplay of a ‘Mission?’
“It’s just not there yet,” he concluded.
Barely two years later, why Cruise reportedly modified his thoughts may need to do with the second half of Deadline’s Could Four headline: “…With Elon Musk’s SpaceX.”
In 2018, SpaceX was nonetheless two years away from launching its first crew—a feat the corporate lastly achieved on Could 30 with the flight of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the house station. Whereas that launch was primarily targeted on demonstrating to NASA that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule was prepared to soundly fly astronauts to and from Earth orbit, it additionally marked the start of a brand new industrial period of US human spaceflight.
“NASA doesn’t want to be the owner and operator of the hardware. We also don’t want to be the only customer,” stated Bridenstine after SpaceX’s history-making launch. “We want SpaceX and others to go get customers that are not us.”
And immediately, Hollywood nonetheless qualifies as “not NASA.”
NASA/Sharon McDougle
Seats on the market
Tasked by the White Home to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA has sought to unencumber assets by turning over its actions in low-Earth orbit to industrial companions. To that finish, in June 2019, the house company introduced it was making the house station out there for industrial alternatives and “marketing these opportunities like we have never done before.”
“We’re saying the power for personal astronauts to go to the house station on US autos and for corporations to have interaction in profit-making alternatives,” stated NASA’s then-chief monetary officer, Jeff DeWit.
Seven months later, the company entered negotiations with Axiom House, an area providers firm primarily based in Houston, to connect no less than one new module to the station as a precursor to Axiom establishing its personal industrial outpost. Led by Michael Suffredini, NASA’s house station program supervisor from 2005 to 2015, Axiom is focusing on 2024 to start launching its “Axiom Segment.”
Earlier than then, the corporate plans to start launching prospects for brief stays on the station utilizing SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. A primary mission with three passengers—together with a veteran astronaut as a information—is slated for the autumn of 2021.
Since SpaceX’s Demo-2 launch, “everybody’s starting to wonder where their place in line is,” Suffredini informed The Related Press on June 4. “That is a very, actually cool place to be in now.”
Axiom has not stated whether it is concerned in Cruise’s plans, however Bridenstine confirmed the corporate’s involvement in an interview with the Off-Nominal podcast posted on-line on June 15: “Axiom is working with Tom Cruise in the making of a movie,” he stated.
Along with providing the seats to launch to the house station, Axiom can be set as much as present the coaching {that a} undertaking like this is able to require utilizing the identical crew that has ready NASA astronauts for the journey.
