Fun movie trivia

Guess how they were able to make the space scenes look realistically weightless? Well, it turns out, the film-makers really did make the actors weightless! See, at the time this movie was being made, the actors on wires just weren't working to give the scenes in the capsules that realistic look.

So what the film-makers did was, they teamed up with a company (that is still in business, by the way) that actually uses special airplanes (many piloted by ex-astronauts, by the way), to do a form of flight that imitates low-G conditions. I don't know the actual name of the plane, but some people have nicknamed it, the "Vomit Comet."

So what happened was, they basically had to build the sets into the cabins of at least one or two of those crazy planes, and go up in those planes hundreds of times to get every shot they needed for the 3 actors that would be weightless in the capsule. Talk about suffering for your art.

But in the end it was worth it, because they got the most realistic depiction of astronauts in space you'll ever see outside of amateur videos shot by real astronauts up in shuttles or the International Space Station.