Space Odyssey: Voyage to The Planets

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
—Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets (released as Voyage To The Planets And Beyond in the United States) is a British two-part science-fiction series telling the story of a manned voyage through the solar system, presented in the style of a documentary. It was made for The BBC, and first broadcast in November 2004. It was written and directed by Joe Ahearne and produced by Christopher Riley.

Five astronauts pilot the spacecraft Pegasus on a tour of the solar system. Their mission takes them to Venus, Mars, through a close fly-by of the Sun, Jupiter and its moons Io and Europa, Saturn and its rings and moon Titan, Pluto, and a fictional comet. Manned landings are made on Venus, Mars, Io, Pluto and the comet, while robot probes are dropped on Europa and Titan.

The crew encounter many hardships and disappointments along the way. The Venus landing 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 the ship's medical officer dies of solar radiation-induced cancer after Pegasus enters Saturn orbit, forcing the crew to decide whether to continue the mission to Pluto, or abort and return to Earth. In the original British release, the crew decides to press on to Pluto, while the version broadcast in the United States on Science Channel was trimmed for length, with the crew deciding to turn back at this stage rather than continue.

The series adopts a documentary style, and claims to be based on "science fact rather than fiction". It certainly makes a serious attempt to depict the solar-system, voyage, space-craft and planets in a fairly realistic manner based on current scientific knowledge, but it remains a work of fiction, albeit one at the very hard end of Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness.

Tropes used in Space Odyssey: Voyage to The Planets include:
  • Applied Phlebotinum: While not entirely fantastic, some of technology remains well beyond our current capabilities, including: Pegasus' fusion engines, the aerospike rockets that allow the landers Orpheus and Ares to descend to and take off from Venus and Mars respectively and the force-field-like magnetic radiation shielding.
  • British Brevity : It's only a two part miniseries, and the two episodes combined clock in at just under 2 hours.
  • British Telly: It was made by the BBC. Having two out of five crew-members British rather strains credibility. It might have been better to include a Chinese, Japanese or Indian astronaut (since those countries, unlike Britain, actually have national space programs), or at least an astronaut from another ESA country.
  • Camera Abuse: The cameras on Venus quickly fail under the hellish conditions; one is shown, half-melted and smoking, from the astronaut's POV. On Io, the high level of radiation (from Jupiter) shows up as random bright spots in the picture.
  • Captain's Log: Every member of the crew seems to be recording a video diary.
  • Cool Car: The Mars rover.
  • Cool Starship: Pegasus is 1300 metres long and masses 400 tonnes. Her aeroshield is 400 metres in diameter. Her four main engines are powered by nuclear fusion using liquid hydrogen as propellant. Her internal volume is roughly that of ten jumbo-jets, and holds 60 tonnes of food, 80 tonnes of oxygen, five landing vehicles and several unmanned probes. She's cool all right.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Lessard.
  • Did Not Do the Research: Generally averted, and the makers have Shown Their Work, but there are exceptions:
    • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The Science Director says "Much bigger, and Jupiter would have begun fusion and become a second sun.", implying that it was a near miss. Current scientific opinion is that Jupiter would have to be about seventy-five times more massive to begin fusion.
    • Space Does Not Work That Way: Aurora-like effects appear around Pegasus, and Lessard's Io landing spacesuit, when the magnetic anti-radiation shielding is operating. Sulman even names the aurora round the ship "Aurora Pegasalis". Auroras are caused by high-energy particles interacting with planetary atmospheres, and would not occur in the vacuum of space.
  • Fake Nationality : Yvan Gregoriev is played by Rad Lazar, a Yugoslav-born actor. His Russian is pretty authentic though, so it doesn't come through as Lzherusskie.
  • Foreign Cuss Word: Gregoriev curses in Russian. Lessard also speaks Russian, and the two of them occasionally slag each other off in that language. Polite Russian dialogue is subtitled, but not the cursing.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: When Pearson, the medical officer, develops cancer due to radiation exposure, he refuses to undergo chemotherapy, because the toxic by-products in his urine would contaminate the ship's recycled water supply, endangering the rest of the crew. However, Fridge Logic does lead one to wonder why the ship is carrying drugs that cannot be used safely in the first place, and why the crew can't rig a low-pressure still from their lab equipment to recycle Pearson's urine separately. Deus Angst Machina, presumably.
  • Incurable Cough of Death: Pearson, as his cancer worsens.
  • Killed Off for Real: Pearson.
  • Meaningful Funeral: After Pearson dies, the surviving crew wrap his body in aluminium foil and Kirby solemnly releases it into the rings of Saturn.
  • Mission Control: Mission Control, obviously. Duh!
  • Multinational Team: The crew of Pegasus, because "No single nation could take on a project this vast. A manned mission to the planets is a global endevour." They double as a Five-Man Band :
    • Tom Kirby, Mission Commander, American.
    • Ivan Gregoriev, Flight Engineer, Russian.
    • John Pearson, Flight Medical Officer, British.
    • Zoë Lessard, Mission Scientist, Canadian.
    • Nina Sulman, Mission Scientist, British.
  • Narrator: David Suchet fills the Greek Chorus role.
  • Official Couple: It's very low-key, but there are pretty clear suggestions that Lessard and Gregoriev are an item. Everyone else is pretty much No Hugging, No Kissing, despite being sealed in a can for six years.
  • Science Marches On: This kind of program is obviously particularly vulnerable to being rendered obsolete by later scientific developments:
    • The fate of the robot probe dropped on Titan was deliberately left ambiguous, because the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft was due to land on that moon only three months after the programme's broadcast date.
    • Pluto is referred to as the outermost planet in the Solar System. In 2005, Eris (a larger "tenth planet" even further out) was discovered. Subsequently the International Astronomical Union (IAU) formalised the definition of a planet in 2006, and reclassified Pluto, Eris and Ceres as dwarf planets. The statement that Pluto has never been visited, will become outdated if the current New Horizons mission is successful.
  • Some Additional Stuff On The Website
  • Space Does Not Work That Way: Almost completely averted, but there are exceptions:
    • In Space Everyone Can See Your Face: Eschews the usual stupid lights inside the helmet, but unfortunately also the metallic anti-radiation coating that renders real space-suit visors opaque from the outside.
    • Space Is Noisy: Mostly averted with the "external" soundtrack restricted to the musical score or radio chatter, but Pegasus' main engines are shown roaring several times, and there are some dubious rumbling sounds as the comet breaks up.
    • Subspace Ansible: The time-delay for a radio signal from Pegasus to Earth is always listed when the ship reaches a new planet, but the action is cut for dramatic effect, giving the impression of real-time monitoring and communication.
    • The Asteroid Thicket: Nothing like as bad as usual, but the risks involved in passing through the Asteroid Belt are still greatly exaggerated, and Pegasus barely escapes destruction in a near-collision.
    • Following on from Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale above, it is questionable how far the sheer mass of propellant needed for a round-trip of the Solar System is accurately depicted. The crew is shown refuelling Pegasus from a pre-positioned, unmanned tanker in Mars orbit, and similar refuelling off-screen at other points is a plausible Hand Wave.
  • The Big Guy: Gregoriev (Genius Bruiser type).
  • The Captain: Kirby. Also the Flight Director back at Mission Control.
  • The Chick: Sulman.
  • The McCoy: Claire Granier, the Chief Flight Surgeon at Mission Control. Regularly at odds with the Science Director over the risks to which his programme exposes the crew of Pegasus.
  • The Medic : Pearson.
  • The Professor: Alex Lloyd, Omnidisciplinary Scientist, the Science Director at Mission Control. A bit prone to regarding the astronauts as science-gathering machines.
  • The Smart Guy : Zoe and Nina are female versions.
  • Token Minority: Sulman, the only non-white in the crew of Pegasus. The whole cast is suspiciously lily-white for a "global endevour". Apart from Sulman, the only exception is the unnamed East Asian Flight Dynamics Officer or "FIDO" at Mission Control (according to the web-site her name is Isabel Liu).
  • Twenty Minutes Into the Future : Set in the 21st. century, but the date is not stated.
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