The 'Space Between Us' trailer shows us why teens don't belong on Mars
Teens on Earth are bad enough, but put one of them in space and you're going to have some real problems.
Well, at least that's what the trailer for The Space Between Us seems to be telling me.
The new movie follows the story of a crew of astronauts heading to Mars. Along the way, it's revealed that one of them (the woman among the bunch) is actually pregnant. She has the baby, promptly dies and then scientists raise the baby on Mars.
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Mars baby grows into a Mars teenager (played by Asa Butterfield) and somehow starts talking to a girl (Britt Robertson) back on Earth before returning to humanity's home planet. He then runs away to find her because he's a "romantic."
Gary Oldman's character -- who seems to be an Elon Musk-type space entrepreneur affiliated with NASA -- is freaking out this whole time because the Mars teen's heart "can't take" Earth's gravity and will die or something.
So basically, this movie is The Fault in Our Stars but with a Mars kid's mystery gravity problem instead of cancer.
There's a lot happening in this trailer. Let's break it down
In the first frame, Oldman walks out at Spaceport America, a real spaceport in New Mexico.
At some point in the not-too-distant future, the private spaceflight company Virgin Galactic hopes to start flying paying customers to suborbital space from that spaceport, but for now, it's a really cool set for a space movie.
The new trailer also features a bunch of animations of real rockets and spacecraft expected to fly to space or that have already flown.
Sierra Nevada Corporation, a private company building a small space shuttle called the Dream Chaser, has already taken notice of their bit part in the new movie.
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NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) -- the space agency's next huge rocket expected to fly in 2018 -- also makes an appearance in the film in the form of an animation.
For what it's worth, NASA does hope to use the SLS to launch humans to Mars at some point in the 2030s.
What looks like one of SpaceX's future crewed Dragon capsules also appears to dock to a space station. (The crewed version of the Dragon should fly to space at some point in the next year or so.)
As a tried-and-true space nerd, I appreciate the fact that this movie seems to at least try to up its space cred, and despite the fact that its premise is still on the ridiculous end of the space movie spectrum, it still has an interesting idea at its core.
The fact is, no none really knows what would happen if a baby is born in microgravity. It's also unclear what childbirth would be like for a woman in space.
But these are questions we need answered.
NASA officials have often said that humanity needs to colonize at least some places in the solar system to assure that our species survives for aeons, but we can't even begin to do that without understanding how pregnancy and birth happen in space.
Scientists have performed some experiments in weightlessness to see how non-human embryos develop in the absence of gravity, however, there's still a long way to go before any teen is running around on Mars crushing on Earthlings.
Unless you count the one in U.S. theaters on Aug. 19.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
