Ominous music, total: a huge rocket is on the starting ramp, two white Teslas with NASA badges pass a cheering amount. A business-like voice reports on radio: "Two hours and 57 minutes to the start." The Netflix documentary begins so exciting about the largest coup from Elon Musk's start-up SpaceX. The billionaire had done what the NASA had failed: On May 27, 2020, the crew Dragon, the world's first private spaceship, was supposed to bring astronauts from American soil into space again after nine years.
According to the streaming service, the film "Return to space" should give rare insights into NASA and SpaceX "and tell the" exciting, decades of history "of American astronauts that fly back into space on board. But if you hope for detailed information about the rockets, capsules and starts, you will be disappointed. On the other hand, if you like to see polished up and hear Elon Musk, you can look forward to the future of mankind. And yes, that is presented in a very entertaining way.
People were transported by SpaceX after cargo
In July 2011, an era of manned space travel ended in the USA. The last active spaceshuttle called "Atlantis" returned from his flight to the ISS space station and has been retiring in the visitor center of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida ever since. The United States had to buy expensive places in the Russian Soyuz capsule for access to ISS-from an American perspective a humiliation. The space agency NASA was not entirely innocent. Concepts for follow -up programs had been designed, but they all rejected them. And so the only country that had ever brought people to the moon was suddenly completely without transport vehicles for astronauts.
Against considerable resistance in the congress, NASA enforced that commercial companies should fix this shortcoming as quickly as possible. After a multi -stage selection process, the Space Authority commissioned SpaceX and Boeing to develop new mannered spaceships in September 2014. A reasonable choice: The start-up SpaceX already transported freight to the ISS with its Dragon spaceship. The dragon should therefore be expanded to a manned version, called Crew Dragon, with manageable effort. The gigantic aerospace group Boeing, in many ways the opposite of an agile start-up, brought decades of experience as a NASA partner.
The room capsules should be ready by 2017. However, the two contractors did not make progress so quickly. After several delays and an explosion of the prototype, the first manned flight of the crew Dragon was finally set on May 27, 2020.
'A failure for our country'
In their view, the two astronauts comment on the action, Elon Musk is always adequately moved into the picture, and Gwynne Shotwell, the President of SpaceX, also spits several times. During the start, the film rolls up in several flashbacks. You can find out that after the third false start of the newly developed Falcon 1 rocket in January 2008, SpaceX was saved before the end and only by the successful start of the fourth rocket in September 2008. The chief engineer Hans Königsmann reports on his first meeting with Elon Musk, shows his model railway and regrets that after the first false attempt by Falcon 1, he didn't speak a word at home - for two months.
Elon Musk presents his visions and the motto of his company: "The absolutely basic breakthrough that humanity needs to become a multiplanetary species is a rocket system that is completely reusable."
Jim Bridensine, the then administrator of the American space authority, can also comment: »NASA has been neglected for 50 years. As a NASA administrator, I tell you: This is a failure of our nation. «
The film dazzles back to the great time of NASA, when it brought the first people to the Moon with the gigantic Saturn V rocket. Then followed the descent with the overpriced and technically inadequate space shuttles. Two of the five shuttles, the Challenger and the Columbia, crashed, killing 14 astronauts. After these sad pictures we continue with the Crew Dragon Demo-2.
The team is experienced when the team has to be canceled at the last second due to bad weather. It was only three days later, on May 30, 2020, it worked. The two astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken lifted off at 9:22:45 p.m. Central European time and docked to the ISS after a perfect flight 19 hours later. After two months at the space station, the crew dragon takes you safely back to earth. In the meantime, SpaceX has successfully completed five other manned flights.
Little criticism of NASA and lots of praise for SpaceX
The competing aircraft and space group Boeing, on the other hand, is not quite progressing. His spaceship, the CST-100 Starliner, was originally supposed to take off for the first time in 2015. But nothing came of it. Technical problems continued to delay the starts. At the first unmanned test flight in December 2019, massive software errors came to light and the capsule could not dock to the ISS. Boeing still played a software update in flight that made it possible to return to earth successful. NASA then asked for a second unmanned test flight, which is currently planned for May 2022 after new delays.
However, the documentation hardly reports on this. It is largely limited to illuminating the certainly exciting career from SpaceX and its management staff.
The authors did without their own comments and only let those involved speak. The expected effect: everyone emphasizes how wonderful the collaboration is, how enthusiastically they have driven the program and how well their families support them. We are witness to the warm greeting of the astronauts on the ISS and let us show some details of life in space. And finally we can follow how the space capsule ends up after a picture book flight in the water.
This is made exciting, but unfortunately the viewers do not experience any technical details in the documentation. How is the Dragon capsule built? How many astronauts can they transport? What distinguishes you from the Apollo capsule or the CST-100 Starliner? Why did the spaceshuttles not been further developed in their 30 years of operation, and how did the successor programs fail? A little more criticism of NASA, which has been frozen over the years, would also have been appropriate.
Almost like a long SpaceX advertisement
The directors are Jimmy Chin and Elisabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. In 2019, the couple won the Oscar for the best documentary for the film "Free Solo" about free climbers Alex Honnold. So far, they have not been noticed as space specialists. And even with "return to space" they are not characterized.
Most video sequences are likely to appear to be familiar with space traveling; They come from the archives of NASA or SpaceX. Many have long been icons, such as the Saturn 5 starts, the landings of Falcon 9 and the destruction of the spaces shuttles. Only the interviews with the Astronauts, Hans Königsmann, Gwynne Shotwell and some other participants seem to have been made especially for the documentation.
The film is cut briskly, underlaid with emotionally suitable music and emphasizes the human component of space travel. As with the Netflix mini series »Countdown«, which deals with the first tourist flight of a crew Dragon, you have occasionally got the impression that you have come into an overwhelming advertising video from SpaceX. You can watch wonderful people in the process of doing absolute top performance and never being discouraged by setbacks.
At the end of the film, the author of this text felt the familiar relief that always creeps up when the host rolls up the canvas on which he presented glamorous pictures and videos of an unforgettable vacation for two hours.
"Return to space". Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elisabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. On Netflix since 07.04.2022.
