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posted by janrinok on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the something-to-help-them-sleep dept.

I was bored, so I watched the movie that astronauts must view before launch:

Sometime Wednesday, perhaps around the time this article is published, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and his two Russian crew mates—Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner—will repair to their quarantine crew quarters for movie night in the Cosmonaut Hotel.

[...] The Russians have the oldest space program in the world and by far the most traditions and superstitions related to launch, including peeing on the wheel of the bus that takes the crew to the launch pad—a tradition that dates back to Yuri Gagarin's first human spaceflight in 1961.

Among those traditions is watching a movie[*] the day before launch in the Cosmonaut Hotel. It's always the same movie, White Sun of the Desert. No one is quite sure why this Soviet-era film, which came out in 1970, is always watched (yes, it's mandatory). But it likely dates to Soyuz 12, in 1973, when cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov watched the movie before their mission. This return-to-flight mission followed the disastrous Soyuz 11 flight two years earlier, when the spacecraft depressurized as the crew prepared to reenter Earth's atmosphere, killing all three men. Soyuz 12 proved a success, and the movie came to be seen as a good luck charm. Since then, over the course of five decades, the Soyuz has never lost a crew.

[...] The film has nothing to do with space. However, I do think the symbolism of [the main character] Sukhov being far from home and his wife might hold parallels for astronauts about to fly into space, far from their loved ones back on Earth. They will be in the vast expanses of space rather than the empty dunes of the desert, but they will be lonely all the same.

[*] Available on YouTube.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Thursday April 09 2020, @06:53PM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Thursday April 09 2020, @06:53PM (#980641)

    So ... I'm guessing Spaceballs is SpaceX's official prelaunch movie? I think every country's space program should have an official unofficial movie.

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