Advertisement

A Very Brave Astronaut Watched Matt Damon's Space Drama 'The Martian' While in Orbit

image

Matt Damon in ‘The Martian’ (Warner Bros.)

It takes a lot of guts to get blasted into the vacuum of outer space. It takes even more guts to watch movies about astronauts in serious peril while you’re in orbit.

Astronaut Scott Kelly has absolutely no fear, it seems. The NASA veteran spent Sunday night watching an advanced screening of The Martian on a big HD screen aboard the International Space Station. (For the rest of us, the movie opens on Oct. 2.) The film, directed by Ridley Scott and adapted from Andy Weir’s best-selling novel of the same name, stars Matt Damon as a botanist/astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and must figure out a way to survive on the dusty red planet to have any chance of being rescued.

As Kelly alludes to in the tweet above, he is spending a year in the International Space Station, as part of an experiment to see just how long the human body can last in orbit. (His twin brother, Mark — a retired astronaut — is serving as the experiment’s control subject on Earth.) The mission is part of NASA’s effort to figure out just how feasible it would be to launch a manned mission to Mars — which apparently doesn’t work out all that well in The Martian.

This isn’t the first space-set film that Kelly has watched aboard the ISS; in April, he watched Alfonso Cuaron’s Oscar-winning Gravity, which stars Sandra Bullock as a grieving astronaut whose ship gets destroyed and is forced to find a way back down to earth by herself — an even scarier and more realistic plot for a guy orbiting earth. If he’s looking to get freaked out while up there, may we suggest Killer Clowns From Outer Space next?