62 Scientific American March 2000 Invaders from Hollywood

Thomas is now leading the develop-ment of a new NASA training programto make astronauts sensitive to the psy-chological challenges they will face inspace. The initial two-day seminar tookplace last November and included twoastronauts assigned for turns on the up-coming International Space Station. Asecond phase of training this winterconfined a team of astronauts to an iso-lated spot in the Canadian wildernessfor 10 days to complete team tasks.

Stuster insists that the right physicalsurroundings are also essential for long

stints in space. “Humans are incrediblyadaptable, but we don’t want to subjectthem to austere conditions,” he says. AtNASA’s new Habitability Design Centerin Houston, four architects are helping ateam of engineers dream up individualcrew quarters for the International SpaceStation. Soundproof collapsible cubbieswill attach to the station’s inside wall,each outfitted with an aluminum deskand sleeping harness. Astronauts will beable to personalize their tiny havens withbooks and photographs held in place byVelcro straps and bungee cords. A simi-

lar setup could provide private escapefor explorers bound for Mars [see “Howto Go to Mars,” on page 44].

Above all, most experts agree, crewselection is the key to mission success.Hints at a person’s potential to enduremay lie in their biographies. But it maynot be clear how people will get alonguntil they are given an opportunity tospend time together as a group. “Thereare some people who probably shouldn’tgo,” says Apollo 17 astronaut HarrisonSchmitt. “If you want to test it, put themon a space station for 90 days.”

Sitting in the front row in adarkened room where film-makers view “dailies”—raw

footage from recent shoots—is a manyou wouldn’t associate with the glitter-ing world of make-believe. Coming tothis Vancouver studio in a down-to-earthgreen polo shirt, khakis and sneakers,Matthew P. Golombek could be con-fused with a young academic who washeaded to his next lecture but stepped onthe wrong bus. In fact, as project scien-tist for NASA’s 1997 Pathfinder mission,he may be the closest thing Earth has toa resident Martian. Disney has calledhim to serve as a science consultant onits movie Mission to Mars, which opensthis month. As the film rolls, showingactors Gary Sinise, Jerry O’Connell andConnie Nielsen as researchers on theirway to the Red Planet, Golombek can’tresist adding his two cents. “Hey, thesescientists are good-looking,” he quips.“That’s not reality.”

Scientific accuracy doesn’t usuallyseem to be one of Hollywood’s majorconcerns. Yet consultants have alwaysbeen an integral part of science-fictionfilms. Even back in the genre’s heyday ofthe 1950s, “in films we laugh at today,there were consultants to add verisimili-tude,” explains Vivian Sobchack, a filmstudies professor at the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles and author of

the book Screening Space: The Ameri-can Science Fiction Film. Moreover, shenotes, directors often embedded shortdocumentaries within their movies. Forinstance, Them!, the classic film about

marauding mutant ants, contains a mini-documentary about the insects.

Modern special effects have made iteasier than ever to put science intomovies. They enable Mission to Mars to

Thanks to Pathfinderand other missions,science gets some respect in Tinseltown, as staff writerPhilip Yam finds after touchdown on a Vancouver set

MARS ON EARTH: The habitat module from Mission to Mars looks authenticallyweathered by dust storms. It took some 120,000 gallons of latex to paint the ground.

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Invaders from Hollywood

give viewers a feel for what it might ac-tually be like to travel to and survive onMars—from zero gravity to witheringdust storms—as well as of the main sci-entific reason for doing so, namely, look-ing for life. Golombek, along with NASA

astronauts Story Musgrave and KathrynClark, read the script and discussed thetechnical reality with those responsiblefor different aspects of the movie.

Most eye-opening to a visitor is the55-acre outdoor movie set at the FraserSand Dunes, just south of Vancouver.There set decorators trucked in tons ofpebbles, coated the area with thousandsof square yards of “shotcrete”—spray-able concrete—and blasted 120,000 gal-lons of environmentally friendly latexpaint out of fire hoses to color the dunesMartian red. The landscape looks straightout of the famous Pathfinder photo-graphs. “I’m so impressed by how theymade it look real,” Golombek says.

Of course, some dramatic license is tobe expected in fiction. To begin with, inthe movie, a rescue effort launches a fewmonths after disaster strikes the firstMartian landing. Realistically, no suchrescue would be attempted, Golombeknotes: Earth and Mars are in orbitalalignment only once every 26 months.So barring a major advance in spacepropulsion, the Martian pioneers are on

their own. For a real manned expedi-tion, NASA might first send robotic mis-sions to build up an infrastructure on ornear Mars, Golombek says. Then, if anemergency arose, a crew might have theessential equipment readily available.

The film also features an unmannedorbiter swinging by Mars on its way toSaturn. That’s not likely, Golombek re-marks: considering Mars’s small size,there’s not much point in using its gravi-ty to accelerate a probe. The astronautsmake a tense space walk to the orbiterfrom their ship, which has been crippledby a micrometeorite impact. In reality,metal shields can protect against theseobjects. Once on board the orbiter, theastronauts descend to the surface—a very

unlikely scenario, in that a robotic or-biter wouldn’t be “man-rated,” as Gol-ombek puts it, and be able to land safely.

It can also be hard for filmmakers tore-create every new scientific detail. Ac-cording to Golombek, the Martian sur-face isn’t truly red; the best informationso far suggests that the ground is prob-ably more of a yellowish brown, al-though the palette varies geographical-ly. Most people see the planet’s color asred because, as far as primary colorsgo, red is the closest match.

Budget restraints lead to other com-promises—in this case, forcing set mak-ers to scale back on construction. Theliving quarters inside the rescue vehicleare part of a 50-foot-wide structure thatspins to simulate Earth’s gravity. But,Clark notes, given the rotational speeddepicted in the film, the pendulum armshould be much longer, which wouldhave made the whole structure imprac-tically big for the studio. The wheeldoes, however, raise an interesting ques-tion: How does the human body re-spond to different g forces at the sametime? The feet would feel one g but thehead something less because it is slightlycloser to the hub of rotation. Clark saysthere are no data yet on such effects.

For Golombek, the exaggerations donot detract from the real value of thefilm: to convey the sense of adventure inMars exploration and, just maybe, togalvanize the public. The other Marsmovie coming out this year, Red Planet,as well as two projects by director JamesCameron, scheduled for 2001, undoubt-edly make the same trade-offs. “You re-ally have to forgive that stuff,” Golom-bek remarks. Movies just wouldn’t beas much fun if science were to have thelast say: The Angry Yellowish BrownPlanet just doesn’t cut it. As Golombekconcludes, “Hollywood does a muchbetter job of talking about what NASA

does than NASA does itself.”

ROTATING LIVING QUARTERS in a spaceship would actually have to be much big-ger if they were to simulate the gravity of either Earth or Mars.

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Return to the Red Planet. Eric Burgess. Columbia University Press, 1990.Cycler Orbit between Earth and Mars. D. V. Byrnes, J. M. Longuski and B. Aldrin inAIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Vol. 30, No. 3, pages 334–336; May–June 1993.

Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration. Jack Stuster. Naval In-stitute Press, 1996.

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. RobertZubrin and Richard Wagner. Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the Mars Society. Edited by RobertZubrin and Maggie Zubrin. Univelt, 1999.

Additional information on Mars missions is available at www.marsacademy.com, www.thinkmarsnet, http://www.nsbri.org/ and members.aol.com/dsfportree/explore.htm on theWorld Wide Web.

Scientific American March 2000 63

Further Information for Special Report on Mars

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