After climbing El Capitan for their Oscar-winning documentary, “Free Solo,” and going into caves to “dive out” the Thai soccer team in “The Rescue,” filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin go to the final frontier with ” Return to Space,” their informative chronicle of SpaceX and the new era of human space flight.
The filmmakers track SpaceX and Elon Musk’s failure to launch a rocket (Falcon 1) three times before they reached liftoff. But as the film shows, their trial-and-error period resulted in SpaceX developing the science to perfect booster landings and creating a “reusable rocket,” and man a successful commercial mission, Dragon Demo 2, to the International Space Station. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are interviewed in the film about their experiences.
In addition to admitting the Dragon Demo 2 — the best sequences in “Return to Space” are the ones where there is zero gravity — Vasarhelyi and Chin consider how NASA has changed, ending their space shuttle program, relying on corporate partnerships, as well as ideas about life beyond earth. The filmmakers chatted with Salon about their thoughts about space travel and their new documentary.
Most kids at some point in their lives want to be an astronaut. Did you ever have such aspirations?
Jimmy Chin: Yes. I still want to be an astronaut.
E. Chai Vasarhelyi: My dad is a professor of Artificial Intelligence, and he was at Bell Labs in the ’80s and ’90s, and I grew up around nerds and professors. It was always part of our lives. I remember the first time one of his colleagues gave me a picture of an eclipse. It just evolves from there. I have always been interested in space, but I didn’t want to be an astronaut because you had to be a fighter pilot first, or a double Ph.D. physicist. But it is fascinating that this is an area that leads to reflection on humanity itself. I love “Spaceballs” and grew up with sci-fi and Philip K. Dick.
What can you say about the access you had with SpaceX to tell this story? You provide a real insider, behind-the-scenes view of the company.
Vasarhelyi: We were doing this during a pandemic. At one point, there was a rule that no two people could be in the same room on federal property. Imagine making a film in that context! We had great access. This is a very special space where people love what they do. For Hans [Koenigsmann, President of Mission Assurance] and Bala [aka Balachandar Ramamurthy, Director of Flight Safety] to share their world was incredibly important to them.With SpaceX, there is always so much attention to Elon, but he has an important engineering team behind him that have been with him since the beginning, and you get to know those individuals in the film. There was this internal SpaceX thing that they were happy that Hans was getting that attention and proud to share that story. The same thing with Doug [Hurley] and Bob [Behnken]. NASA just worked with us in a special way to get access and footage that is normally never seen, such as their last phone call to their kids before they board the Dragon.
Chin: It’s a classic documentary example of doing anything and everything you can to get as much access as possible. It’s a similar challenge in documentary work because you want to provide an entire picture.
