"We thought, anybody watching this thing is going to get motion sickness."Īctors Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon were directed by Howard with the energy and efficiency of a coach giving marching orders for a football play. "Actors and things kept drifting in and out of the shot," recalled NASA test director, Bob Williams, in The AV Club's retrospective. Cameramen, actors, and equipment were just floating around in a constant battle of trying to achieve some balance while also filming a scene. Each of those parabolas would guarantee a weightless moment, but it meant everyone and everything was weightless. Consider this: how much of your job could you accomplish if you were only able to work in 25-second increments? That's all the time the cast and crew of "Apollo 13" had to pull off their zero gravity shoots. The KC-135 was leased for six months of filming, and shoots would happen twice a day.Ī simple, elegant solution to Howard's problem, right? What's better to mimic the effects of floating in space than to simply film floating in a plane? The only problem was that even if the flights lasted around two or three hours, filming consistently was not possible. Imagine being on a rollercoaster and gently coming out of your seat for a short moment when racing down a drop, but on a massive scale. Through the rise and fall, around 25 seconds of weightlessness was possible. To achieve this effect, the plane was flown in curved arcs called parabolas. Sometimes known lovingly as the Vomit Comet (via ), NASA used the KC-135 plane to train, test equipment, and study zero gravity. After chatting about the problem to Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard looked into how NASA trained astronauts for weightlessness, and that's how he was introduced to the possibilities of the KC-135. CGI wasn't as advanced as it is now, and wire work would have been tricky to film to in a convincing way. The first problem to tackle was figuring out how to film the zero gravity shots so the scenes in space looked realistic. Mr Kohler says: "One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.Director Ron Howard turned to Jim Lovell's book recounting the experience, "Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13," into a movie. The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag. Only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even Nasa was only given a censored version." "Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere. He cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. Scientists need to know how far sexual relations are possible without gravity." "The experiments carried out so far relate to missions planned for married couples on the future International Space Station, the successor to Mir. "The issue of sex in space is a serious one," he says. Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place. US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday.
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