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Space School - turning actors into astronauts

It was crucial that the actors in the series were able to portray as realistically as possible the lives of the astronauts they were playing.

So, the programme-makers put them through a crash course in space flight and exploration by sending them to their very own Space School.

The Space School tutors included Dr Chris Welch, a spacecraft engineer and principle lecturer in astronautics at Kingston University; Dr Kevin Fong, co-director of University College London's centre for extreme environment medicine; Jean Pierre Haignéré, one of only two European astronauts to spend six months on board the Mir space station; and David Scott, Commander of the Apollo 15 mission to the Moon and a technical consultant on the Apollo 13 movie.

To ensure convincing performances, the actors trained hard in the spacecraft sets, practising launch and landing procedures, until they could find all the right buttons and controls with their eyes closed.

The British National Space Centre in Leicester then put them through special team-building exercises so they were able to build up rapport and bond quickly to ensure that, on screen, it would feel as if they'd been training together for years, as would have been the case if this were a real mission.

Spending any amount of time in space has an effect on an astronaut's mind and body, but a mammoth six-year trip would undoubtedly place a huge strain on a person's psychology and physiology.

The experts explained the facts, whilst the astronauts discussed their own experiences and reactions to stress and dangerous situations.

This gave the actors a firsthand understanding of the real-life pressures of space travel, enabling them to portray their characters as credibly as possible.

Another integral part of the actors' once-in-a-lifetime training experience was to spend a week at the world-class Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut training facilities at Star City, just outside Moscow.

The team spent time on spacecraft simulators there, sharing time with a crew bound for the International Space Station.

Here, the actors practised space walks in a massive neutral buoyancy tank, where they floated around a full-scale space station mock-up, and rode the extreme Gs of the largest covered centrifuge in the world.

Then came the ultimate ride. The actors (in real space suits), props, spacecraft sets and filming team were loaded on-board a colossal cosmonaut-training cargo plane which flew a series of stomach churning parabolic curves - climbing hard then heading into a steep dive - to mimic zero gravity.

The contents of the plane are effectively in free-fall, creating weightlessness for all those on-board… and nausea!