Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets

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Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets
US DVD Cover
Genre	Sci-fi Docudrama
Creator(s)	Joe Ahearne
Starring	David Suchet
No. of episodes	2
Production
Producer(s)	Impossiblepictures
Running time	100 min.
Broadcast
Original channel	BBC
Picture format	Widescreen
Original run	2004-11-09 – (UK)
Links
IMDb profile

Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets (Or Voyage To The Planets And Beyond as it is known in the United States) is a fictional story of a manned voyage through the solar system presented in the form of a docudrama. Space Odyssey premiered in 2004 and was made by the BBC. It was written and directed by Joe Ahearne and produced by Christopher Riley.

1 Story
2 Characters
3 Notes
4 The Book
5 External links

[edit] Story

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Five astronauts pilot the Pegasus spacecraft on a tour of the solar system. Their mission takes them to Venus, Mars, a close flyby of the Sun, Jupiter’s moons of Io and Europa, Saturn’s moon of Titan, Pluto, and Comet Yano-Moore. Most of the planetary destinations the crew reaches are followed by a manned landing there. The crew encounter many hardships and disappointments along the way. A Venus EVA that almost ends in disaster when the lander Orpheus encounters launch delays, a Titan probe that fails after deployment and the loss of samples from Jupiter's moon Io all test the crew's resolve. The most devastating blow comes when John Pearson dies of solar radiation-induced cancer in Saturn orbit, the point where the crew must decide whether to continue the mission to Pluto, or abort and return to Earth. The crew decides to press on to Pluto, making history (in the American edition, they do not go to the dwarf planet).

[edit] Characters

Tom Kirby - mission commander. American citizen of Amerindian descent.
John Pearson - flight medic. British citizen.
Yvan Grigorev - flight engineer. Russian citizen.
Nina Sulman - exobiologist. British citizen of African ancestry.
Zoë Lessard - geologist. Canadian citizen.

Also, several members of Mission Control, most notably:

Alex Lloyd - mission scientist (SCIENCE). British citizen.
Clare Granier - flight surgeon (SURGEON). Citizenship unclear, may be French.

[edit] Notes

The fate of the Titan probe Pegasus launches was deliberately ambiguous to prevent any conflicts with the findings of the then imminent landing of the Huygens probe.
The broadcast of Space Odyssey on the United States' The Science Channel differed from the full version with the cut of the arrival at Pluto and simply proceeded with the crew heading to the comet. This is because the U.S. version had the crew decide to turn back to Earth rather than press on to Pluto. The encounter with the comet is inferred to take place somewhere between Saturn and Jupiter.
To prepare them for the roles, the actors undertook basic cosmonaut training with the Russian space program prior to shooting.
Many scenes were shot in simulated zero-gravity aboard an aircraft.
The film's score was written by American composer Don Davis, who wrote the music for the Matrix trilogy.
The film had originally been titled Walking with Spacemen due to the involvement of Tim Haines the creator of the Walking with Dinosaurs series in some of the production. This title was eventually dropped as Space Odyssey had little in common with the Walking with . . . series.

[edit] The Book

BBC Books published a book with the same title as the UK version of Space Odyssey which included the fictional diary entries of the crew on Pegasus, information on the planets they visited and screenshots taken from the drama.