Wild Wild Space and 10 more titles to join your space race

The battle for our future is happening now, right above our heads. Lively, trash-talking HBO documentary Wild Wild Space takes us inside the modern space race between rival private rocket technology companies determined to claim territory in low Earth orbit – where an estimated 10 000 satellites now orbit, providing everything from broadband services, to government surveillance, climate change analysis, and agricultural monitoring. 

Wild Wild Space filmmaker Ross Kaufmann and tech journalist Ashlee Vance – whose 2023 nonfiction book When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach forms the backbone of the documentary – turn our attention to three companies in particular that are operating in the shadow of the billionaire boys club  of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink satellite network, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. 

Wild Wild Space zooms in on Chris Kemp and Adam London’s Astra Space, Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab, and Will Marshall’s Planet Labs – as the documentary spent six years tracking how they broke away from (or were barred from) the traditional aerospace giants, the showmanship involved in their battle for investors, the business behind blastoff, the backstabbing and sneaking between competitors, and the raw, emotional rollercoaster of failure and success that comes with building your way to blast-off through trial and error – when each rocket failure represents a catastrophic multi-million dollar setback. 

If the space aspect of the story doesn’t grab and shake you, Ashlee points out in her Reddit AMA that there’s Succession– and Billions-style drama built into the entire industry. These companies are not just fighting each other: Wild Wild Space gives us rare and unusual access to their vicious internal battles between financing and engineering.

“It’s a very, very difficult balance to get right. You want to do space cheaper and faster and push the industry forward. But the rocket has to work at some point or everything falls apart,” Ashlee explains. “Whatever you make of Chris Kemp (Astra’s volatile CEO), he did what he said he would do. He built a glorious rocket factory. He got the company the money needed to make lots of rockets. In the end, the rockets not working has been the main issue. Was Chris part of that problem and were there management mistakes that hindered the rocket development? It’s easy enough to find people who worked at Astra who would say yes. Chris surely pushed the company to go very fast in the early days. From my outsider perspective, they went too fast without having the right controls in place.”

Stream Wild Wild Space now.

10 more movies, series and documentaries for your space race

1. Apollo 11
2. From the Earth to the Moon
3. Apollo 13
4. I.S.S. International Space Station
5. Interstellar
6. Passengers 
7. Avenue 5
8. Voyagers
9. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
10. A Million Days

Can’t remember the difference between Passengers and Voyagers? Apollo 11 and Apollo 13? Read on below for more details and fun facts.

1. Apollo 11

Documentary on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to land the first-ever astronauts on the Moon. Composed of film shot by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins themselves along with previously unreleased archival footage and audio recordings from Mission Control (with no modern reenactments of narration), Apollo 11 won multiple awards including five Critics Choice Awards (2019) and three Emmys (2020).

How they did it: While director-producer-editor Todd Douglas Miller’s production team, NASA, and the National Archives and Records Administration, were searching through the archives, they discovered a series of large format, 70mm reels labelled Apollo 11, that had not been described in the archive records. The discovery led to the preservation and digitisation of the film footage, as well as its use in this documentary.

2. From the Earth to the Moon

This multi-award-winning (including an Outstanding Miniseries Emmy), 12-part 1998 HBO docu-drama television series drew on Andrew Chaikin’s 1994 book A Man on the Moon to tell the story of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions during the 1960s and early 1970s. The series covers everything from the creation of NASA itself, to the investigation into the tragic Apollo 1 fire, to capturing the first televised footage of a Moon landing, and the experiences of ground crews and astronauts’ wives and families. With Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, and Tony Goldwyn.

How they did it: To mimic the effects of lunar gravity (one sixth of Earth’s gravity) during moonwalks – which were shot in blimp hangars on an ex-Marine base – helium-filled weather balloons were attached to the actors’ backs.

3. Apollo 13

This Oscar- and BAFTA-winning 1995 docudrama about the failed 1970 Apollo 13 mission to the Moon dramatises the 1994 book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, by astronauts Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. As nailbiting as any thriller, it explores the collaboration and improvisation between mission control scientists and engineers under Flight Director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris), and astronauts Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) and Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), after an explosion onboard affected the astronauts’ oxygen supply and electrical systems. The incident changed the mission from landing on the Moon, to getting everyone back to Earth alive. 

How they did it: NASA allowed director Ron Howard to film three hours and 54 minutes of zero gravity footage aboard their KC-135 aircraft (nicknamed the vomit comet), which could create up to 23 seconds of weightlessness at a time. And the art department built life-size replicas of both the command module and the lunar module, while visual effects supervisor Rob Legato used model miniatures to recreate the rocket launch, including a cheap 1:144 scale model kit for shots of the rocket in flight. 

4. I.S.S. International Space Station

Sci-fi thriller. As nuclear war breaks out on Earth between the US and Russia, NASA astronaut Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina) receives secret instructions from the US government to seize control of the space station “by any means necessary.” But the Russian cosmonauts have been given similar instructions and a war of cunning and betrayal breaks out between the six previously friendly crew members. 

How they did it: The production and writing team turned to Scott Kelly’s memoir Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery for details of life about the real ISS. And for filming zero gravity scenes, the cast were suspended in harnesses and moved around like puppets by the stunt team. 

5. Interstellar

Chris Nolan directs this epic science-lovers’ drama about a group of astronauts (the cast includes Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Wes Bently) aboard NASA’s top-secret Endurance mission to navigate through a “wormhole” that has opened up near Saturn, in search of a new home for humanity. When one planet plays tricks with time, the visiting astronauts lose 23 years practically overnight and have to figure out what that means for their mission.

How they did it: Production designer Nathan Crowley based the structure of the Endurance on the ISS, and the Endurance ranger was based on the Space Shuttle. Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne acted as Chris Nolan’s advisor on everything from the effects of black hole event horizons, to relativity and time dilation fields, to rocket flight and creating artificial gravity for human habitats. 

6. Passengers

This sci-fi romance could arguably have been reworked into a gripping horror story! Space ship The Avalon is transporting 5 000 colonists and 258 crew in hibernation pods during a 120-year journey to a new planet, Homestead II. But when the ship accidentally wakes engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) 90 years too early following an asteroid impact, he gets so bored and lonely that he picks a beautiful young journalist, Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), to be his companion while hiding the truth from her. But the asteroid’s damage is far more extensive than the ship’s sensors have detected, and a series of cascading failures threatens every life on board. 

How they did it: Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (a former industrial designer for Sony), who designed the Avalon from the ground up, referenced horror movie The Shining while designing the space ship’s bar. And while actor Michael Sheen wore a bartending uniform above the waist to play Android bartender Arthur, below the waist he wore a green leotard so that his lower half could be removed digitally. 

7. Avenue 5

Sci-fi comedy series. Captain Clark’s (Hugh Laurie) luxury space cruise ship the Avenue 5 has been thrown off course, transforming its eight-week scenic flip around Saturn into a life-threatening years-long journey back home to Earth. But don’t put too much stock in that Captain title. The “mastermind” behind the catastrophe and “creator” of Avenue 5, billionaire tech entrepreneur Herman Judd (Josh Gad), hired actors to pretend to be the ship’s crew, since the vessel is fully automated. It’s up to mission control on Earth to figure out how to fix one crisis after another aboard the 3km-long vessel … and then figure out how to get  the incompetents aboard to follow their directions. 

How they did it: Production designer Simon Bowles based the more technical, lower deck sections of the Avenue 5 on his own real-life artists’ tour of the Russian space agency Roscosmos’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, Star City, during which he studied its space station mockups. 

8. Voyagers

Sci-fi thriller movie. In 2063, as the Earth sinks deeper into ecological disaster, astrophysicists launch the Huminitas spaceship mission, manned by a crew who were conceived via IVF and grew up in isolation to prepare them for an 86-year-long space journey – which only their future grandchildren are expected to complete. But 10 years into the flight, chaos and violence erupt after two male crew members, Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead), decide to secretly stop taking the food additives that chemically suppress everyone’s primal drives, and they start a knuckle-dragging rivalry over the ship’s doctor, Sela (Lily-Rose Depp). 

How they did it: Director Neil Burger wanted the Humanitas to feel like it had been built to maximise the use of space and resources, and lists submarine movie Das Boot as one of his major influences. He also explored his ideas for colony ship design by visiting SpaceX in California and chatting to the engineers about how they were simplifying controls in their command capsule. 

9. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Sci-fi series set in the 23rd century just 10 years before the events of Star Trek: The Original Series. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds follows a five-year mission of exploration led by Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), including two other crew members fans met in the series Star Trek: Discovery – Spock (Ethan Peck), and First Officer Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn). 

How they did it: Strange New Worlds’ production designer Jonathan Lee leaned heavily into Matt Jefferies’ original design for the USS Enterprise, but with controls and monitors now built to respond to the cast’s touch, with moving components and pre-programmed graphics on the monitors. He gave the sick bay a complete overhaul, though, moving the beds from being against the wall, to taking up the centre of the bay, allowing cameras to capture the action from every angle. 

Also watch: Star Trek: Into Darkness and its sequel Star Trek: Beyond (which are set in an alternate timeline).

10. A Million Days

British sci-fi thriller. In 2041, with humanity on the brink of destruction, an artificial intelligence nicknamed Jay runs simulations to determine how humanity can leave Earth behind and set up bases on the Moon and beyond. But as Jay’s creator Sam (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) and her astronaut husband Anderson (Simon Merrells) prepare for Anderson to leave on his Jay-guided mission to establish a base on the Moon, they discover that Jay isn’t aiming for Earth’s Moon at all, but has plotted a journey ahead that’ll take the next 2 740 years.

How they did it: Working with a tight budget, director Mitch Jenkins grounded the urgency of the story about space in human choices on Earth in the 24 hours before the mission is set to launch, and the real battle of interpreting, checking and analysing information from AI systems. Aside from the flashback sequence to an accident in space, the most sci-fi part of the story, the nanobots, are represented by a ball bearing covered in ferrofluid in a specimen jar.