LIDF

‘Space Tourists’ by Christian Frei won this year’s Best Documentary Director Award at the Sundance Film festival, and this eclectically structured piece highlights both the dream of mankind to reach the stars and the divisions that exists between rich and poor as represented by their aspirations in connection to that dream. The film mainly tells the story of Anousheh Ansari, a wealthy businesswoman who ploughed $20million of her own money into an 8-day stay on the International Space Station, and, to a lesser extent, that of Charles Simonyi, co-creator of Word and Excel, who is twice visitor to the Station and well versed in the practices of space training. Following them, literally picking up the scraps of their experience, are the inhabitants of rural Kazakhstan, building shepherding hides and selling scrap from the pieces of the rocket engines that fall, spent, to the ground after the rockets take off from Baikonur Cosmodrome. It’s a fascinating piece and was well-received by the audience, who gave gasps of awe and giggles of amusement at some of the film’s aspiration-encapsulating moments: Anousheh washing her hair in zero gravity; Romanian ‘Space Enthusiast’ Dumitru Popescu accidentally sending a fly to the moon. Their greater responses were shown at the Q and A afterwards, where the main question was ‘is there anything to gain from sending tourists into space?’ Ceferino Sanchez, a film and media strategy consultant, Pat Norris, chairman of the Royal Aeronautical Society Space Group, and Angela Taylor, research astronomer and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin fellow, with help from some ‘experts’ in the audience, debated this issue, discussing how whilst the idea of space tourism has been criticized for widening the gap between rich and poor, it also funds the space programme and will be partly responsible for any further developments in space travel; no governments are likely to be funding this research, it will come instead through private commercial investors and prize funds, such as the Ansari X-Prize, supported by Anousheh Ansari, which encouraged independent competitors to develop methods of providing private flights into outer space. This has also encouraged a more socially and ecologically aware set of projects, such as Dumitru Popescu’s hot-air balloon approach to taking his rocket into the stratosphere without the need for detachable rockets that expend fuel, litter the landscape and endanger local residents. Overall, this was a really stimulating and entertaining evening.