Interesting facts from the set … :
* 3 weeks filming
* 21 flight
* 70 Staff
* 15 professional instructors
* 2 professional air gymnasts
* Crane with a telescopic 7-meter boom, in which the camera was mounted
* about 2000 balls and other props units, which were used during the training and survey flights
* 2 KAMAZ [trucks] for transportation of scenery
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This video shows outtakes of several attempts to do the final scene with the paint-filled balloon:
Here’s a cool music video of the song Upside Down & Inside Out from the band OK Go. It was filmed on a S7 Airlines aircraft flying a series of parabolic trajectories, which provide periods of 20-25 seconds of weightlessness.
[ Update: This is the third video link I’ve posted here. The other two were each disconnected eventually due to copyright issues with OK Go’s record company. I hope this is finally the official video:
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As seen in this diagram, the “zero-g” periods are when the plane coasts over the top of the ballistic trajectory. You pay for this when the plane pulls up and your weight nearly doubles.
Usually people lay down flat during those heavy times. I had assumed the video makers had done an excellent job of weaving a series of segments seamlessly together to make it look like a continuous performance. However, articles about the video say it was actually shot in one continuous take. The band members and stewardess actors steadfastly stood or sat upright and tolerated the extra weight without changing their expressions. It took a lot of planning and practice to make this video.
An Il-76 MDK airplane is capable of flying in parabolic maneuvers to generate brief periods of weightlessness, but these periods only last up to 27 seconds, and the song is over three minutes long. “Because we wanted the video to be a single, uninterrupted routine, we shot continuously over the course of eight consecutive weightless periods, which took about 45 minutes, total,” explains Trish Sie, who directed the clip with her brother, OK Go frontman Damien Kulash, Jr. “We paused the action, and the music, during the non-weightless periods, and then cut out these sections and smoothed over each transition with a morph.”
Update: Watching the video again, it is obvious that it was not a continuous take. One can see where a weightless period ends and then immediately continues into another weightless segment. So they have edited out most of the time that the performers were weighed down.]
These 3 commissioned pieces are part of JPL’s Visions Of The Future 2016 Calendar – an internal gift to JPL and NASA staff, as well as scientists, engineers, government and university staff. The artwork for each month will also be released as a free downloadable poster at the NASA JPL site soon.
NASA JPL was kind enough to let us sell our own limited-edition signed posters and prints. Those are available here.
Peake is the first “official” UK government supported astronaut to go to space. Here is a video of his Soyuz rocket lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. In the Soyuz spacecraft with Peake were Expedition 46-47 Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and NASA Flight Engineer Tim Kopra
And here is a video of the Soyuz spacecraft approaching and docking with the ISS six hours after launch:
.. And so this Monday evening, his mind is on space suits. Right now, specifically, he needs to go see the latest secret prototype of a new kind of space suit—the first to be made by a private rocket company for astronauts to wear into orbit and beyond, which he hopes will go into use in 2017.
“We’re trying to have a good balance between aesthetics and functionality,” he explains, sitting in his office at SpaceX. “It’s tricky to have something that works in reality and looks good.”
As with much of what Musk does, there is a plan, but then, behind that, there’s often a bigger plan. To Musk, it’s obvious that this new space suit not only needs to work well but also needs to look cool, because he needs people—regular people like you and me—to imagine themselves wearing it.
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