The Space Business by Andrew May

The Space Business by Andrew May

Author:Andrew May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00


A few months after the Tom Cruise announcement, Axiom revealed another project in the offing – albeit one that is still several years in the future, and might or might not involve SpaceX. It’s possible they may use Boeing’s Starliner instead for this one. Here again, the client isn’t a space tourist in the usual sense, but a TV company planning to pick a member of the public via a reality show and send them on a trip to the ISS as a prize. The show will be titled Space Hero, and the production company, specially set up for the purpose, calls itself Space Hero, Inc.

Whether anything will come of this remains to be seen. At first glance, it looks a little too close to previous projects that have promised far more than they were able to deliver. First, in December 2005, came a British TV show called Space Cadets – produced by the same company, Endemol, that had been responsible for the grandaddy of all reality shows, Big Brother. The basic concept was ostensibly identical to Space Hero. A group of contestants, confined to a sealed-off environment in what appeared to be a private space centre, were whittled down until the final four were selected for a five-day trip into Earth orbit.

That’s what the participants were led to believe, anyway. Right from the start, the audience at home were let in on the secret. The whole thing was a hoax, and the spaceflight would be simulated on Earth using a plywood space shuttle that had previously seen service as a prop in films like Armageddon and Space Cowboys. The contestants were put through a series of tests which, unbeknownst to them, were designed to select the exact opposite of the character traits that would really make good astronauts.

The producers wanted people who were, to put it bluntly, stupid enough that they wouldn’t question why they didn’t feel any g-forces during launch, why they didn’t become weightless in space, or why they weren’t allowed to look through the windows used by the shuttle’s ‘crew’ (actually played by actors). The tests were designed to select candidates who not only lacked a scientific education, but had no trace of scientific curiosity or judgment either. On top of that, they had to be sufficiently suggestible to accept anything they were told, no matter how ludicrous, rather than trusting the evidence of their own senses.

Even so, many viewers found it hard to believe that anyone could be quite as gullible as the winning contestants appeared to be. Unlike most reality shows, there was no audience involvement – no voting, no calls to premium phone lines – and hence no cause for litigation on grounds of misrepresentation. So it seems likely that Space Cadets was actually a reverse hoax – not on the gullibility of the participants, who were probably in on the joke all along, but of the TV audience who lapped it up.

Whatever kind of hoax Space Cadets was, it was ultimately a credible one.



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