Coming Soon..... Stowaway

In 2015 Joe Penna AKA MysteryGuitarMan contacted me about a movie he was writing about a crew headed to Mars, asking if I could offer some technical advice about space stuff. I jumped at the chance to get involved in a project like this and over the last few years I've been answering questions, sometimes doing the math and offering suggestions on how to make the story they wanted to tell work.

I don't want to spoil anything that isn't in the trailer, but we do get a few glimpses of the spacecraft where the story takes place. The spacecraft consists of a habitation module, a power and communications module and a propulsion module all joined by cables such that they can be extended and spun up during the months long journey to Mars. This gives the crew gravity, but more importantly, it vastly simplified production of the movie and changed the story in a crucial way (which I'm not going to spoil).

As  pre-production was getting started I threw together a model of the spacecraft using Kerbal Space Program, a visual reference for the designers who were working on the real thing. This first model took me a few minutes to put together which surprised Joe who expecting something that might take days. We think this might be the first movie to have Kerbal Space Program used as a production aid!

It's another month before the movie is actually released, I haven't seen the whole thing, and I fully expect that the nature of production means lots of changes to the script from the 2015 version I read. I'm looking forward to it either way, because it's been a fun experience to sit on the sidelines and get a chance to highlight mistakes and problems before they make it to the screen.

Stowaway | Official Trailer | Netflix (YouTube)