As the space mission “Inspiration4” orbits 575 kilometers above our heads with its crew of non-professional astronauts – a first ever -, Nickelodeon launches the series The Astronauts, conceived by Daniel Knauf and produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, the couple to whom we owe films such as A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13 and the docufiction series Mars.
I make an astronaut
As the title suggests, the ten episodes of The Astronauts, broadcast two a week and set in the near future as to seem tomorrow morning, are dedicated to space pilgrims. Except that, in this case, the astronauts are five teenagers who have gone beyond the atmosphere for too much curiosity and for a software error of the spaceship Odyssey 2, state of the art of our technology, defects included. , that the computer driving the vehicle, called Matilda, expresses an autonomous will like the Hal 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a capacity for discernment, however, based on cloud computing, on social networks, on the panoptic vision that observes everything except privacy , and about other nightmares of our era.
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History
It is just one of the many references between reality and narration, a symmetry reaffirmed by the simultaneous broadcast on Nickelodeon and the journey of Inspiration4, which should not be interpreted only as a greedy marketing opportunity offered by the true mission. in fact Hayley Arcenaux, the first person to fly into space with a prosthesis, an artificial left femur. Suffering from osteosarcoma at the age of 10, Arcenaux was admitted and healed at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, where she now works as a medical assistant with patients suffering from leukemia or lymphoma. It is the hospital to which the proceeds of a charity campaign that aims to raise 200 million dollars will go and which is the real purpose of the mission currently in orbit, as told by Jared Isaacman, billionaire businessman (he is the boss of the online banking service Shift4 and the private airline Draken), as well as the commander of the trip. In other words, at 575 kilometers of altitude Inspiration4 aims to reaffirm, in the construction of our future, the importance of inclusiveness, hope and altruism. It is not only (or a lot) rhetoric, since it is Isaacman himself who talks about it, who paid for the travel tickets out of his own pocket by buying them from SpaceX for, it is rumored, not less than 200 million dollars, the same amount that he aims to donate in charity (in addition to the 100 million that he has already personally donated to St. Jude).
Reality or fiction?
Precisely in the commonality of the values attributed to a space (and a future) for all, The Astronauts and Inspiration4 seem to mirror each other. Aimed at an audience of young and very young people, the series tells about gender disparity, discrimination of race, wealth or culture as the legacy of a bygone era, something to get rid of or to literally leave on the ground. As if to reiterate the historic words of the first man to fly beyond the sky, Jurij Gagarin, who from up there said he did not see the borders of our planet. Divisions to get rid of to ensure that the young astronauts behave as a team, in a path of growth and liberation from an adult world brutalized by contraction, by the most sinister opportunism and without prospects (that one of the parents of the protagonists remembers Elon Musk is a corollary who knows how involuntary).
Politics in Astronauts
The rest is a riot of nerdy culture – the actors also trained with NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy -, youthful jargon (to take notes of) and artfully arranged quotes to thrill cinephiles: the sequence in which, having to unclog a space toilet, the five astronauts relive an entire sequence of Alien is the very enjoyable spy of a narrative register that touches parody without ever becoming one. They will be metaphors at the limit of the caption, those of The Astronauts, but the series is also aimed at children. And it is an aspect that makes it even political, in the sense of oriented towards and from a precise vision of the world (gender fluid, multi-cultural, open, almost collectivistic). true, in which space is, yes, an opportunity for international collaboration and economic-cultural growth for countries up to a few years without access to the sector (and to orbits), but also an increasingly complex arena of industrial competitions, commercial interests and geopolitical repercussions. Easy by communicative necessity, the rhetoric – also filmic – of The Astronauts is an invitation to the awareness of diversity – of role, age, background, identity – understood as richness, as a characteristic with which to compose a profound point of view on living Together with Inspiration4, the words of Paolo Nespoli, veteran of the national astronautics come to mind: space reminds us that our Planet is a spaceship of which we are not the passengers. But the crew. The Astronaut would be seen with children or grandchildren, and with the knowledge that they need it most.