Everything we know—and don’t—about Tom Cruise’s plans to film a movie in space

[Karlston]

Everything we know—and don’t—about Tom Cruise’s plans to film a movie in space

“Axiom is working with Tom Cruise in the making of a movie,” Jim Bridenstine said this week.

Enlarge / Tom Cruise, at center, poses with NASA astronauts at the 2002 premiere of the IMAX film Space Station 3D at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. From left to right: Robert Curbeam, Marsha Ivins, Koichi Wakata, Scott Altman, Nancy Currie-Gregg, Bill Shepherd, Susan Helms, IMAX producer Toni Myers, James Voss, Yuri Usachov, Yuri Lonchakov, Jim Newman and Brian Duffy.

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For some in the space community, it sounded like the rehash of an old rumor: “Tom Cruise Plots Movie To Shoot In Space…” read the headline of a Deadline Hollywood article published last month.

 

The “exclusive"—all three paragraphs of it—was short on details, but the mention of Cruise and space was all that was needed for other publications to want to run with the story and for social media to light up with the news.

But this was not the first time that had happened.

 

Four years ago, almost to the day, a British tabloid claimed that Cruise had been training for a flight on the space shuttle and could have been among the astronauts who died on board the orbiter Columbia in 2003. The Daily Star’s report of the actor’s previous “top secret mission” quickly spread across the Web until NASA stepped in and quashed the story.

 

Whether spurred on by that bit of “fake news” or Cruise’s track record of trying to top his own daring stunts in each of his hit action movies, another rumor began gaining traction in 2018 that the next installment in Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise would be what finally sent him off the planet. “He’s not going to space, nor does he need to go to space,” Director Christopher McQuarrie told Empire in February of this year.

 

So in light of that precedent, it was a bit of a surprise when the head of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, took to Twitter the day after that Deadline report to confirm the scoop: “NASA is excited to work with Tom Cruise on a film aboard the International Space Station!” he wrote.

 

Why is the idea of filming in space any different this time around? Just when the 2018 rumors about the next Mission: Impossible movie were starting to make the rounds, Cruise himself explained why the concept of an actor going into space was a problem.

 

“It is the mechanics of getting it there,” Cruise said in an August 2018 interview with Collider. “How do you build a sequence there, and how long can we have that sequence? Because if I went up … how do you put that into the structure of a screenplay of a ‘Mission?’

 

“It’s just not there yet,” he concluded.

 

Barely two years later, why Cruise reportedly changed his mind might have to do with the second half of Deadline’s May 4 headline: “…With Elon Musk’s SpaceX.”

 

In 2018, SpaceX was still two years away from launching its first crew—a feat the company finally achieved on May 30 with the flight of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the space station. While that launch was primarily focused on demonstrating to NASA that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule was ready to safely fly astronauts to and from Earth orbit, it also marked the beginning of a new commercial era of US human spaceflight.

 

“NASA doesn’t want to be the owner and operator of the hardware. We also don’t want to be the only customer,” said Bridenstine after SpaceX’s history-making launch. “We want SpaceX and others to go get customers that are not us.”

 

And today, Hollywood still qualifies as “not NASA.”

Enlarge / Tom Cruise wears a space shuttle-era Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES) pressure garment during a visit to the Jake Garn Simulator Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, in September 2002. Pictured with Cruise (left to right): astronaut Charlie Precourt, Bill Todd, Sharon McDougle, and George Brittingham.

NASA/Sharon McDougle

Seats for sale

Tasked by the White House to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA has sought to free up resources by turning over its activities in low-Earth orbit to commercial partners. To that end, in June 2019, the space agency announced it was making the space station available for commercial opportunities and “marketing these opportunities like we have never done before.”

 

"We're announcing the ability for private astronauts to visit the space station on US vehicles and for companies to engage in profit-making opportunities,” said NASA’s then-chief financial officer, Jeff DeWit.

 

Seven months later, the agency entered negotiations with Axiom Space, a space services company based in Houston, to attach at least one new module to the station as a precursor to Axiom establishing its own commercial outpost. Led by Michael Suffredini, NASA's space station program manager from 2005 to 2015, Axiom is targeting 2024 to begin launching its “Axiom Segment.”

 

Before then, the company plans to begin launching customers for short stays on the station using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. A first mission with three passengers—including a veteran astronaut as a guide—is slated for the fall of 2021.

 

Since SpaceX’s Demo-2 launch, “everybody’s starting to wonder where their place in line is,” Suffredini told The Associated Press on June 4. "That's a really, really cool position to be in now.”

 

Axiom has not said if it is involved in Cruise’s plans, but Bridenstine confirmed the company’s involvement in an interview with the Off-Nominal podcast posted online on June 15: “Axiom is working with Tom Cruise in the making of a movie,” he said.

 

In addition to offering the seats to launch to the space station, Axiom is also set up to provide the training that a project like this would require using the same team that has prepared NASA astronauts for the journey.

Booking the cruise

In the month or so since Cruise’s plans became public, only a few more details have been learned. To start, Deadline followed up its original report with news that a director was also attached to the project.

 

“Doug Liman will boldly go where no film director has gone before. Liman plans to accompany Tom Cruise on the action adventure film to be shot in outer space that is being mounted independently (for now) and involves Elon Musk’s Space X [sic] and NASA,” Mike Fleming Jr, Deadline’s co-editor in chief for film, wrote on May 26.

 

Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs Smith) previously worked with Cruise on the films American Made and Edge of Tomorrow. According to Deadline, Liman also penned the first draft of a screenplay for this still-untitled space project.

 

For now, no studio is attached, and the timeline remains unknown. Both Liman and Cruise have other projects in the works, including Cruise’s role in McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible 7.

 

There’s also the underlying question of the budget. Without knowing all of the companies that are involved (other than in some way, SpaceX and Axiom), the price tag remains unknown. A figure of $55 million has been reported as the cost for a seat on Crew Dragon, but that may not include the required expenses associated with training and logistics support, the latter in this instance encompassing launching movie cameras and other equipment for the shoot.

 

Add to that the cost of operating on board the space station—NASA published a detailed rate card when it announced its plans to commercialize the complex—and the price of just accessing and working on orbit could very quickly exceed $178 million. That was the entire production budget for Cruise’s 2018 movie, Mission: Impossible—Fallout.

 

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Fit for space

Deadline stated that both Cruise and Liman plan to launch to the space station to film the movie themselves rather than sending others in their place. But their ability to do so has yet to be confirmed.

 

At the minimum, it is expected that Cruise and Liman will have to pass a NASA physical (or the equivalent) to be eligible to fly, which is a step neither has taken or made public if they have.

 

Beyond physical ability, though, some have questioned if Cruise, in particular, is suited for a trip to the space station. At least one astronaut—the only person to fly into space and fly with Cruise on film—says that he is.

 

“I was very impressed with how he conducted himself professionally,” said Scott Altman, who, before launching on four space shuttle missions for NASA, was one of the four F-14 “Tomcat” fighter jet pilots selected by the US Navy to fly with and for the actors in the 1986 movie Top Gun. Altman flew with Cruise in the backseat and then donned “Maverick’s” helmet to fly as Cruise in the action film.

 

“I was impressed at the way he approached it,” Altman told Ars recently. “When we briefed him, he paid attention, he listened, and he responded. He was respectful and really excited about flying.

 

“We did some of the different stunts, and that's what really sparked his interest in aviation,” said Altman.

IMAX stuff counts as a film, right? (This now appears to be on Hulu, FYI.)

 

Filming in space

Some of the articles that followed up on Deadline’s reports described Cruise’s project as the “first movie shot in space.” To claim that title, though, you would have to go back 36 years.

 

NASA’s 11th space shuttle mission lifted off in April 1984 with a large-format motion picture camera to capture scenes for what would become the first movie to be filmed, at least, in part, in outer space. While the producer and director remained on the ground, NASA’s astronauts took on the roles of cinematographer and stars of the 1985 IMAX documentary film, The Dream Is Alive.

 

“We trained 14 astronauts initially, and each one had about 25 hours of training,” said director and IMAX co-founder Graeme Ferguson in a 1986 interview with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. “They had, on average, about nine [film] magazines per flight, so basically they could shoot around 27 minutes.”

 

Even then, to get the footage needed for the 37-minute final film, IMAX cameras were flown on three missions.

 

IMAX cameras continued to fly throughout most of the space shuttle program. On later missions, the astronauts shot scenes in 3D and used high-definition digital cameras to substitute for the much larger film models. In addition to The Dream Is Alive, five more IMAX movies featured scenes shot by the astronauts in space.

 

Filming aboard a spacecraft presented unique challenges, said Altman, who helped capture and appeared in the 2010 IMAX documentary, Hubble 3D.

 

“One of the problems is that you'd be all set up for a shot and then go into a night pass. You can't hold and stay where you are for 45 minutes until the [sun]light comes on again,” Altman explained. “Having to deal with that was another level of complexity, and that may be one of the hardest things for someone doing a movie—controlling the lighting sufficiently to get the shots when they can because orbital mechanics is driving the lighting that you have there.”

 

Another constraint was the limited space to move around aboard the shuttle, which would also apply to the even smaller Crew Dragon. But the space station, said Altman, might offer a good platform for a movie shot in space.

 

“The good news about the space station is how big it has grown,” he said. “There is room to get some separation, and you could potentially film on some part of the space station without interacting or overrunning the crew.”

 

Cruise is at least generally familiar with the size and layout of the space station, having served as the narrator of the 2002 IMAX documentary, Space Station 3D.

 

“One day, you, too, may visit the space station. You might be an engineer inventing a whole new technology. You could be a doctor or an ecologist studying the Earth. Or you could be planning a trip to another planet,” said Cruise in his voiceover for the film, omitting “movie star” or “director” from his then-list of future crew members.

You can make the first *scripted,* *feature* film in space perhaps, Tom.

 

Sticking to the script

Altman and his fellow astronauts who shot for IMAX in space did so without a script. They were tasked with capturing events as they happened, rather than also creating the drama for the screen (with the possible exception of a few staged zero-g aerobics and floating food fights).

 

Trying to tell a story, such as Cruise and Liman have planned, adds another level of complexity, said Richard Garriott, who knows from first-hand experience.

 

“In 2008, I shot the first narrative movie in space,” Garriott said in a May interview with KTBC, the local FOX affiliate in Austin, Texas. “A friend of mine, a writer named Tracy Hickman, wrote a screenplay, I took it up in space and we filmed it—including myself and the other crew mates I had up there on the space station—edited it in space and even premiered it in space.”

 

Garriott’s 7-minute Apogee of Fear was created during his privately funded trip to the space station, as organized by the space tourism company Space Adventures.

 

To make things easier, at least given the limits of his production, Garriott created cue cards for his cast to read from, and he filmed the scenes in the sequence in which they would appear in the final movie, which is rarely the way films are shot on the ground.

 

Still, he found it difficult to keep everything in frame.

 

“It is surprisingly tricky to film in space because not only does any manipulation you want to do [with] the camera create issues with the inertia of moving objects, but the same thing is true of your actors,” Garriott said. “It is hard for actors to take a position due to Newton’s laws. Once you start to move, you tend to keep going.”

 

At least one other narrative film was shot in a microgravity environment, though not in space. Apollo 13 recreated NASA’s ill-fated space mission by filming Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon aboard the space agency’s weightless wonder (or “vomit comet”), a modified KC-135 aircraft that was normally used to train astronauts by flying parabolic arcs.

 

The cast and crew of that movie, though, was able to reset and position for the next scene between the 30-second intervals of zero-g on each parabola.

 

“It is hard to stop on a mark for good cinematography,” said Garriott of the differences aboard the space station.

 

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The need for... inspiration

After Top Gun was released into theaters in 1986, the US Navy saw a 500-percent increase in interest in enlisting. Bridenstine said he has similar hopes for Cruise’s space movie.

 

“There was a day when I was in elementary school when I saw the movie Top Gun, and from that day, I knew I was going to be a Navy pilot. It was just the way it was,” said the NASA administrator and naval aviator in the lead-up to SpaceX’s crewed launch. “And if we can get Tom Cruise to inspire an elementary kid to join the Navy and be a pilot, why can’t we get Tom Cruise to inspire the next Elon Musk?”

 

“Exactly, get the kids fired up about wearing that spacesuit, wanting to fly that [spacecraft], go to orbit, go to the moon, go to Mars,” said Musk, who said the Cruise project “should be a lot of fun” on Twitter. “Reignite the dream of space and get people of all walks of life excited about the future.”

 

Altman sees this potential, too.

 

“Once you go to a movie with an actor as famous and renowned as Tom Cruise, you are really going to extend that reach and more people will see that and start to think, ‘Hey, that is exciting. This is pretty cool. That would be something to strive for,” he said. “Not everybody is going to become an astronaut or fly to the space station, but they will be excited about what we are doing in space.”

 

Robert Pearlman is a historian, journalist and the editor of the space history news website collectSPACE.com. His writing often focuses on the topics where space exploration and pop culture intersect.

 

 

Everything we know—and don’t—about Tom Cruise’s plans to film a movie in space

 

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