WASHINGTON (States News Service) - While real-life NASA scientists
search for water on Mars, astronauts in Hollywood’s "Mission to Mars" have already found it.
From conception through completion of "Mission to Mars", the next movie from veteran action-movie director Brian DePalma, NASA was on hand to provide input to the script, including the cinematic invention of the discovery of water.
"Everything in the movie is based on what NASA is planning on doing," said the film’s publicist, Warren Betts. "[NASA] was on our set every day giving us instructions and making sure our technology was exact."
The "Space Act"
An action adventure due out in March 2000, "Mission to Mars" enjoys a closer partnership with the agency than any film in history, thanks to a new pact the agency has made with Hollywood. The "Space Act Agreement" allows filmmakers to consult astronauts, design experts and scientists – and even use NASA launch facilities – depending on the individual contract.
While NASA has given advice on past space movies like "Apollo 13" (1996), "Mission" is one of the first projects to sign the pact, giving the film's creators access to the space agency's expert advice from scriptwriting through final editing.
The film’s producer, Tom Jacobson, whose other credits include "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off" (1986) and "Mighty Joe Young" (1998), says his movie gained much from NASA's involvement.
"It wasn’t that I felt a moralistic responsibility to be accurate scientifically," Jacobson said. "I think it plants the viewer more firmly in a world that seems real."
Design by the experts
Jacobson went to NASA four years ago, even before Disney approved the film. Soon after that first meeting, he and the scriptwriters went to NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston to meet with Mars experts.
The producer consulted famed astronauts Story Musgrave and Joe Allen, who worked with the actors to show them how an astronaut works in space. Kathleen Clark, NASA’s senior scientist for the
International Space Station, helped the production team decide how the ISS might develop over time.
"We took the design of the International Space Station and then we added to it our own design," Jacobson said. "We put a big revolving hub on it to emulate artificial gravity, and we theorized that that is where there is a Mars communication compost," that hypothetical Mars missions would launch from.
Jacobson also bought the rights to a book by former physicist Robert Zubrin, head of the Mars Society, to guide him in molding the story line. "In reality a lot of the design ideas in [the book] are similar to ideas that are on NASA’s drawing board right now," he said. The film’s Earth-return vehicle, a greenhouse and power plant are based on Zubrin's ideas.
Hollywood realism
"Mission" is the story of a NASA-piloted mission to Mars in 2020. Something goes wrong after the mission leaves the ISS, astronauts die, contact with Earth is lost and a rescue mission is sent. While Jacobson declined to continue, he said the film encounters at least one element of fiction: alien life.
"From the very beginning, we were interested in doing a realistic-dramatic adventure about a journey to Mars," Jacobson said. "We started talking to NASA and they were incredibly open."
Because you can’t pay NASA directly, filmmakers who sign a Space Act hire the former astronauts and engineers independently, without any payment to the government. They negotiate the costs involved with the experts before signing the agreement.
NASA is also advising "Titanic" director
James Cameron, who is directing a five-hour TV miniseries about Mars, as well as a separate 3-D IMAX film about the first human flight to the Red Planet.
Although NASA doesn’t view the Space Act as a vessel for public relations ("We’re not in advocacy mode," said Lewis Peach, former director of advanced projects in the office of spaceflight at NASA, who consulted for the DePalma project), it benefits them nonetheless.
"There is an increasing awareness within NASA about the importance of public engagement," Peach said. "Letting [the public] know what they’re doing … and also finding out from the public what their interests are."
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