What was the first movie shown on a big screen in outer space?
By now, space advancements have gone well beyond the essentials.
Astronauts have figured out how to get people safely into space and back, how to explore Mars, and how to land on the moon. They even solved how to let someone skydive from space back down to Earth. At this point, it almost seems like the next frontier is simply finding ways to have more fun out there.
If you ask me, space is absolutely none of our business, and as the idea of taking joy rides there becomes more and more likely, following Katy Perry’s 15-minute long jaunt up to the galaxies, it brings into question why we’re pushing forward with space exploration, given the environmental impact and, obviously, the risk of pissing off some aliens up there.
However, since the dawn of the modern age, it has been an ongoing obsession. Before the moon landing, people had been dreaming of such a thing for generations, as the fascination with what space is like, what is up there and how far it stretches continues.
Despite the huge amount of research and exploration already done, it remains largely a mystery with cosmoses upon cosmoses untouched, but as knowledge improves on the safety of these trips, astronauts can be afforded more comfort now, and places like NASA can have a bit more fun and can integrate more with culture.
In 1965, a bunch of astronauts snuck instruments on board to be the first musicians playing a song in space with a rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’, after which, in 1988, a tape of Pink Floyd’s live album for Delicate Sound of Thunder was taken up there and played as a crew floated around, and in 2024, Sarah Gillis played a live violin performance in space, so it’s fair to say astronauts are really up enjoying themselves facing the music, while setting records in it, which brings to mind the cinephiles. Those journeys into the galaxies can be long, and stints at the space station can be boring, so one imagines you’d be inclined to watch a movie too.
What was the first movie beamed on a big screen in outer space?
Aptly, the first movie reportedly shown in space on a long-duration trip was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to astronauts on the Soviet Salyut 6 space station in the late 1970s.
On the whole, the astronauts seemed to love the Kubrick movie as the writers genuinely got things right. “Now, the projecting forward of Arthur C Clarke was just such a marvel of imagination, but not just guessing. He predicted that communication satellites would rotate at the same rate that the Earth rotates. They’re in orbit travelling, so they sort of remain stationary over the equator,” Buzz Aldrin once said as the film managed to somehow predict future technology advances.
But crews were watching that on a small screen back then, so in 2015, the International Space Station landed on its first-ever big screen as a projection screen designed for use in microgravity.
For that first full-scale, cinema-experience movie night, astronauts watched the 2013 movie Gravity, which, admittedly, feels like kind of an insane choice; if I was floating above Earth on a space station, I’m not sure the movie I’d want to watch would be a stressful sci-fi thriller about the destruction of a space shuttle and a near-fatal attempt to return home. It seems like the type of film choice that would spike the anxiety, but apparently, the astronauts loved it too.
