It’s a well-known joke in science fiction fandom circles that the silliest thing about the Star Trek franchise is the lack of seatbelts on various Starfleet craft. That said, in the 1960s, Star Trek was also one of the first mainstream science fiction TV series that actively consulted with real scientists, including experts at the Rand Corporation and NASA. By the 1970s, the inspiration of boldly going where no one has gone before resulted in the first space shuttle being named Enterprise, and in the 1980s, it was a sci-fi actor, Nichelle Nichols, who led the crusade to recruit female astronauts and people of color to NASA’s shuttle program. To put it another way: sci-fi clearly has had an impact on the history of spaceflight, but what about the other way around? Has popular science fiction gotten closer to mirroring real-life spaceflight?
If you asked that question 20 years ago, the answer would be maybe not. Because while huge sci-fi franchises broke into the mainstream in the early 21st century, it’s not like the MCU or the first 2009 J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot were super-concerned with accuracy or real space science. (What is “red matter,” anyway?) Historically, pop sci-fi’s role in real space advancements was that of an ideological cheerleader, and if fans wanted harder SF, they’d generally have to turn to the printed word. But since the twenty-teens, a science fiction paradigm shift has occurred, with bigger and more mainstream projects focusing on space storytelling that hews closer to real science.
It began in 2013, when Gravity made us dizzy and afraid of life on the ISS, and Europa Report gave a tiny Jupiter moon its big screen moment. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar had us thinking about flying near black holes in 2014, and The Expanse made us rethink mining all the rocks in the solar system shortly after. The Martian influenced real-life research on how we were going to get to Mars in 2015, and then, by 2019, For All Mankind broadcast the real-life spaceflight comeback with a simple alternate history premise: What if the space race never ended?
Movies like 2015’s The Martian showed audiences had a growing taste for hard sci-fi. | 20th Century Fox
Younger audiences today might take this premise as a current fact of life. Today, the space race is booming — especially in TV and movies. Look to Project Hail Mary, a blockbuster that is taking the plausibility of Andy Weir’s most audacious premise and making it seem real, thanks to an incredibly crafted film from Christopher Miller and Phil Lord. Project Hail Mary is so clearly space science-coded that the first major screening for the film was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Whereas Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica weren’t really shows about space, but instead, the human condition, this new trend suggests that space itself is as integral to the context of these stories as the human element. Space, in a way, is a character now. In other words, in the old mode of TV and film sci-fi, space was often an analogy, a fantastical setting that allowed for allegorical stories with some distance from real life. But if the current trend continues, it means space is finally allowed to simply be itself — a cold empty void that is the stuff of a NASA engineer’s dreams.
How The Space Race Nearly Destroyed Hard Sci-Fi
If you look at spaceflight science fiction in the past 10 years, it’s clear that “we’ve kind of picked up the pace in the real world, in terms of space exploration,” Garrett Reisman tells Inverse. A former NASA astronaut and SpaceX advisor, Reisman has served as the science advisor on the Apple TV series For All Mankind since its launch in 2019. Reisman points out that the inception of that show didn’t start with a pitch in a Hollywood office, but instead came out of conversations between himself and legendary sci-fi writer and producer Ronald D. Moore. After the conclusion of Moore’s reboot Battlestar Galactica — which Reisman also consulted on — the Star Trek veteran was looking for inspiration from real spaceflight for his next project.
“Ron attended my last Space Shuttle launch,” Reisman explains. “He wrote this great email to me about how it was a full-circle moment for him. He talked a lot about the interplay between science fiction and science fact and how a lot of science fiction writers like Ron and others on Star Trek, or projects were inspired by the Apollo era and all the successes we had with the Moon landings.”
Reisman was referring to the launch of STS-132, in May 2010, the second-to-last trip for space shuttle Atlantis. The full-circle nature of this moment wasn’t exactly one filled with hope, as America’s space program seemed to be winding down rather than moving forward. In the intervening years, the privatization of space, as well as a NASA comeback, has made the last days of the Shuttle Program more of a chapter in the book of space, rather than the end. “Obviously, Musk and Bezos went off and created space companies to actually try to fulfill the promise of the Apollo era,” Reisman notes.
STS-132, launching here in May 2010, was the second-to-last trip for space shuttle Atlantis and a real-life inspiration to Battlestar Galactica director Ronald D. Moore. | NASA
If you don’t think there’s a hypothetical yo-yo effect between sci-fi and spaceflight, consider this: the dawning of real spaceflight briefly had a negative impact on the business of science fiction. In 1957, after the successful launch of Sputnik, the once-thriving SF magazine business was hit very hard. In his essay “When It Comes True, It’s Not Fun Anymore” (from the book Age of Wonders), the late SF editor and historian David G. Hartwell points out that the dawning of the space age wasn’t good for print science fiction, at least not at first. Turns out, real space travel almost murdered the science fiction field.
The reason why is a little complex. Paperback novels were replacing the monthly magazine digest in terms of consumer habits, and magazine publishers in the 1950s were consolidating more generally. But there was one culprit: The general public cared less about fictional space flights because many of science fiction’s biggest proponents at the time (like John W. Campbell) had specifically emphasized that science fiction’s purpose was predictive. Hartwell’s argument is that the idea that sci-fi should be predictive is foolish. It can be, of course, but that’s not its aim or purpose. “The popular idea outside the field — that somehow the business of SF is to predict what will come true — is dangerous and mistaken, a perversion of truth and science.”
If you look back at science fiction films and TV released during the shuttle era (from 1981-2011), the few (and there are few) that actually attempted to depict real spaceflight and with real spacecraft are primarily historical dramas like The Right Stuff (1983) or Apollo 13 (1995), both of which were more about nostalgia than anything, and neither of which was science fiction at all, merely space movies. Perhaps the only realistic-ish spaceflight movie from the shuttle era was 1997’s Contact, which dared to boldly send Jodie Foster where she’d never gone before, thanks to some blueprints radioed over to us by aliens. While space travel and the search for life beyond our planet are the focus of Contact, the film doesn’t actually get to space until the last act. To put it another way, if Project Hail Mary were to have come out in the 1990s, you can imagine only a brief scene at the end where Ryland Grace gets into space and meets an alien.
Perhaps the only realistic-ish spaceflight movie from the space shuttle era (1981 to 2011) was 1997’s Contact, which dared to boldly send Jodie Foster where she’d never gone before, thanks to some blueprints radioed over to us by aliens | Warner Bros. Pictures
Today, Project Hail Mary and For All Mankind feel like the kind of science fiction homecoming, the sort of sci-fi spaceflight nerds have wanted all along. And while watching, you might say to yourself, “they don’t make them like this anymore,” but, to quote Dr. Ray Stantz, the parapsychologist: “Nobody EVER made them like this.”
What For All Mankind and Project Hail Mary Foretell
For All Mankind, which hit screens in 2019, seems to be the beginning of this new phenomenon, rewriting the past with a simple sci-fi twist: NASA is motivated to get a Moonbase up and running because the USSR got boots on the lunar surface first. But crucial in this detail is the word “Moonbase.” That didn’t happen in 1973 (as it does in FamK) and it hasn’t even happened now. But, what makes this kind of sci-fi interesting is that it could have happened, and if Artemis succeeds long-term, we’ll catch up to For All Mankind, albeit several decades late.
Reisman makes it clear that at every point, For All Mankind truly does try to stick close to what would have been possible in each era the show explores, and that sometimes that fidelity to realistic spaceflight science creates a kind of cheerful grumble from the creative folks. “Ron once said, ‘This was so much easier in Star Trek. All we had to do was to reverse the polarity of the Deflector Dish and connect Data’s positronic brain, and everything was fine.’ And that’s interesting to me. Because I think when we work with the constraints of physics and the constraints of the technology, it actually helps our writing team.”
For All Mankind truly does try to stick close to what would have been possible in each era the show explores, and that sometimes that fidelity to realistic spaceflight science creates a kind of cheerful grumble from the creative folks. | Apple
Of course, great science fiction about realistic spaceflight couldn’t be possible without an audience. The early pulps of the golden age of science fiction proved there was a readership for sci-fi stories about rocket ships. The 1960s and 1970s proved that science fiction could be spun into mainstream TV and unforgettable feature films. When you dig into just how deeply scientific audiences want these stories to be, this too seems to follow a cycle.
“When I started pitching Isolation 10 years ago, the word was it was ‘too sciencey,’ and now I’m getting pushed a little the other way,” The Next Generation writer Morgan Gendel explains. “The potential buyers want to make sure it’s sciencey enough, and clearly there’s an interest there, and we shouldn’t shy away from the science.”
Science Forward — For Good?
As the writer of The Next Generation classic “The Inner Light,” Gendel knows a thing or two about the interplay between science and sci-fi. He’s also the driving force behind the theoretical space habitat called Habolith, which, he hopes, can serve as a model for shelter on the Moon or Mars. And while working on his current in-development eco-thriller — a science fiction show connected to climate change called Isolation — Gendel says he’s noticed a shift in the way potential buyers talk about science in scripted TV.
In Project Hail Mary, it’s not so much that past science fiction predicted the future, but that past science fiction informed our present-day, more precise science fiction. | Amazon MGM
Gendel ventures a guess that part of the reason general audiences are more interested in real science in their science fiction might be because science programming has been slightly democratized by a proliferation of documentary programming on various streamers, not to mention the ocean of technical and professional and user-made science content on YouTube. In the 1980s and 1990s, there weren’t countless streaming documentaries about space travel. Pretty much all we had back then was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. But today, the public might be more educated about space. How many space videos do kids watch on their tablet today compared to the sparse amounts of programming available back in the 1980s or 1990s?
“There are so many things in streaming and so much science out there too that you can stream and watch,” says Gendel, who also points out that since he’s collaborated with scientists and engineers on Habolith, his connection to Star Trek is almost always the starting point of the conversation. “There are so many scientists out there who will say, oh yeah, I got into this line of work because of Star Trek,” Gendel says. “So therefore, they’re bringing a love of sci-fi to science. And then now, you’ve got guys like Andy Weir who took it the other direction.”
The titular spacecraft of Project Hail Mary doesn’t look bonkers, and in the book, Weir writes that the ship “has always looked like something out of a Heinlein novel. Shiny silver, smooth hull, sharp nose cone.” It’s tipping a hat to the foundations of science fiction, but also providing a practical reason for that design. In Project Hail Mary, it’s not so much that past science fiction predicted the future, but that past science fiction informed our present-day, more precise science fiction.
“Even with all this capability we have now, we still can’t fake a moon landing on a Hollywood soundstage. It can’t be done. And that’s a good thing.” | Apple
Still, at the end of the day, science fiction is fake, and spaceflight is real. No matter how convincing and plausible certain kinds of science fiction might be, there are still fantastical elements. In For All Mankind and Project Hail Mary, we don’t have a plentiful source of Helium-3 to create nuclear fusion, and we have yet to ever run into any actual alien microbes, let alone ones that feed on stars. Reisman still has a desire to make “cool tech” happen on For All Mankind, but admits there’s always some tension between making something cool and making something real. Plus, there are still limitations to just how real space science can be. When For All Mankind Season 3 aired, Reisman said he received complaints that the dust on the Martian surface didn’t look realistic in terms of the gravity on Mars. But, as he reveals, there’s an upside to some space sci-fi still looking a bit fake.
“I hope we can film something like For All Mankind in space someday,” Reisman says. “But we still get some stuff wrong right now. And that’s as it should be. Even with all this capability we have now, we still can’t fake a moon landing on a Hollywood soundstage. It can’t be done. And that’s a good thing.”