Review: Space: The Longest Goodbye — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Space: The Longest Goodbye

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

Writers: Ido Mizrahy, Nir Sa’ar

Director: Ido Mizrahy

In Theaters and Streaming

 

When it comes to sending humans to Mars, the hardest part may not be designing and building the necessary rockets and life support systems. As this insightful documentary suggests, the real challenge may be in tending to the softest of software: the emotional health of both the intrepid men and women who make the trip — and those waiting for them back on Earth.

Think about it: Right now, the estimated time for a trip to and from Mars, including some meaningful time on the planet’s surface, stands at about three years. That’s longer than most military deployments, with the added “bonus” of being crammed with your crewmates into a box the size of a school bus.

It’s a challenge that, co-writer/director Ido Mizrahy assures us, NASA is working on. What remains unclear, even after a decade or so of research, is whether or not humans are truly up to the task of isolating themselves so thoroughly from their planet and people.

It’s a challenge that already sets off tremors under present-day astronauts. We meet Cady Coleman, a former Air Force colonel, who spent 159 days on the space station, away from her husband Josh Simpson, a Massachusetts glass artist, and their young son. NASA policy allows astronauts to keep their family communications private, but here Coleman and Simpson bravely share a series of heartbreaking video chats as their son endures — with understandable anger and dismay — his mother’s long absence (constant glitches in the circa-2010 Internet video links didn’t help). Even what should have been a moment of tender togetherness — a flute duet played by mom and her son via video — ends in tears, both planetary and orbital.

“We all start wondering if we’re doing the right thing,” Coleman tells us. “Should I have left my family back there?”

The perfect Mars mission astronaut, it appears, would be a longtime naval submariner with no family. Kayla Barron, an International Space Station mission specialist featured here, meets the first half of that bill: She spent much of her military career underwater as a sub warfare officer, squeezing between banks of equipment and her crew. Amiable, adaptable, and obviously some kind of genius, Barron, who has already spent 177 days on the space station, seems like the poster child for a mission to Mars.

But Barron does have a husband, Tom, also a military officer. Here he faces the camera smiling, endlessly supportive of his wife, clearly excited about the possibility that she might make history someday soon. But, he allows, there’s probably a big difference between knowing the person you love is circling 100 or so miles above, reachable by radio at a moment’s notice, and coping with the fact that, even at light speed, anything you have to say to your Mars-bound spouse via radio will take up to eight minutes to reach her.

Such flesh-and-blood emotions were never of concern to NASA’s early engineering corps, who fashioned the space program around a generation of test pilots; guys who, by training and nature, didn’t seem to care much whether they lived or died — so long as they got to go really, really fast in the process.

It was way back in 1994 that NASA realized long-term space travel could pose emotional and mental challenges. Enter Al Holland, a psychologist the agency asked to study the issue and devise possible remedies. Still active as a NASA consultant, here Holland recalls valuable lessons he learned during, of all things, the 2010 Chilean mine disaster, when 33 workers were stuck 2,300 feet underground for 69 days. Studying how the miners interacted with each other — and with their families, who were able to communicate with them via closed circuit TV — Holland realized the more he could reassure the above-ground people that everything would be all right, the more that message was absorbed by the men far below.

Understanding the problems of space-borne isolation, however, is very different from solving them. And while the latter half of The Longest Goodbye explores tactics currently being employed to mitigate the loneliness of space, none of them seem particularly hopeful.

A mock Mars settlement in the American Southwest goes awry almost immediately as the occupants, selected after a worldwide search, go running from the place in a panic. Some scientists in the film suggest the old sci-fi standby: suspended animation for the duration of the trip to and from Mars. But psychologists push back, fearing the information overload of learning everything that has transpired on Earth during that long sleep — perhaps even the death of a loved one — could result in more harm than good.

Most disturbingly, a robotic companion named CIMON, supposedly programmed to provide reassurance and advice to a lonely astronaut, is in operation aboard the space station barely a minute before it becomes scarily self-defensive and pouty.

“Be nice, please,” the spherical robot, roughly the size of a football helmet, pleads without any apparent reason. The astronaut testing CIMON tries to laugh off the comment, but CIMON won’t have it.

“Don’t be so mean, please,” the robot persists. “Don’t you like it here with me?”

If The Longest Goodbye had a higher budget, this would have been a good place to splice in the signature moment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when astronaut Dave asks HAL the computer to open the pod bay doors.

“Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore,” says HAL in an eerily CIMON-like voice. “Goodbye.”

Of course, CIMON is just an experiment, and no doubt a tiny bit of reprogramming will get him, as they say, right as rain. But CIMON’s meltdown isn’t the only moment in The Long Goodbye when scientists could have taken a tip from science fiction.

Consider the old 1960s series Lost in Space, for instance: On that show, the Robinson Family found all the emotional support they needed on their ill-fated voyage to Alpha Centuri from each other. Why not send couples, like Kayla Barron and her husband, into space together?

Yeah, maybe NASA just needs a movie critic on retainer. I’ll wait for the call.