Video produced and directed by Hannah Lindner, shot and edited by Condé Nast Entertainment. Click here for transcript.
When we met up with former astronaut Scott Kelly last month, we didn’t waste all of our time playing Kerbal Space Program. Kelly is most famous—as I’m sure pretty much everyone has heard at this point—for spending more than a year in orbit aboard the International Space Station. So we had a great idea: why not trick him aboard a rocket, maroon him on the station again, and then force him to give us an awesome tour of the joint?
But while we were elbows-deep into working out the logistics of acquiring a rocket with a crew capsule and then tricking Scott Kelly onto it (possibly using a giant bear trap and the astronaut equivalent of a “free bird seed” sign), we had an even better idea: why not skip the rocket and the kidnapping and instead fake it with visual effects? It would certainly help keep the production budget under control, and we figured it would probably be safer, too.
Kelly was game, and so after our Kerbal shenanigans, we got the astronaut situated in our jury-rigged space simulation chamber and, with a little movie magic, instantly transported him back to the tiny, cramped world in which he’d been confined for a full year of his life. Fortunately, astronauts are made of pretty stern stuff, because instead of moaning “oh no not again” or cowering under a table, Kelly launched into a detailed, informative, room-by-room, module-by-module description of the most expensive and exclusive chunk of real estate in existence. From the Russian section to the US section, from Zvezda to PMA2, we invite you to sit back and watch as Kelly describes the sights, sounds, and smells (yes, the ISS does have some of its own odors) of the world’s highest-flying laboratory.
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