![]() When animals hibernate they’re not really sleeping. When Chris Pratt is stumbling around and yawning, that’s similar to the conditions we’re expecting. The wake-up scenario was good, although you don’t have an exact feel for how long those time periods were. But with advances in medicine and reduced metabolism it would be on a much slower time scale. If you don’t stop all cellular activity, there would still be some aging. There are certainly companies out there that freeze people, but no real plans and no idea how to bring people back from that. The movie erred on the non-freezing sort of approach, which is what we think is the more viable option. At those time scales, 100 years or more, there are still two approaches there. Or you could do the cryo-preservation that you sometimes see, where we’re going to stop all cellular activity and essentially just freeze people. But we think that if you push down the metabolic rate even more than what we’re trying to do, with a combination of some anti-aging or regenerative drug therapy you could potentially go that route. We’re hoping we can sustain for six months on a Mars trip, or a journey within our solar system. We think there are two ways, maybe, to do this. We’re concerned about skin abrasions over long periods, so you don’t want a lot of contact there. They weren’t cryogenically frozen, which goes to another level of stasis. ![]() We’re always concerned about tubes or any sort of puncturing of the skin, which present an increased risk of infection. was minimally invasive, in terms of support systems. We’re currently thinking of a more open environment, but I think we may go back to the more contained pods. ![]() ![]() Having the crew members in individual stasis pods is a trade that we’ve made. This interview has been compressed and edited for clarity.Īir & Space: So from a speculative-science perspective, what does Passengers get right?īradford: A couple of different aspects. While Bradford was not involved in the writing or production of the movie (which was written by Jon Spaihts and directed by Morten Tyldum), Columbia Pictures tapped him to assist in its promotion by discussing how its story, set in some unspecified period in the distant future, reflects the hoped-for outcomes of his firm’s research. It’s also key to the premise of Passengers, a new outer-space romance starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence that opens today. The idea of spending long spaceflights in hibernation is a familiar one in science fiction stories and movies, having been depicted in classics of the genre like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien. Air & Space / Smithsonian will publish a feature on this research by Arielle Emmett in our April-May 2016 issue. It’s a state of reduced core temperature and low metabolism that would reduce the mass required of the mission (by saving on food and other supplies) while also, Bradford and his team believe, protecting them from radiation. The NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts program has awarded SpaceWorks two grants since 2013 to design plans for “Mars transfer habitats” that would carry explorers-or, in the more elaborate of SpaceWorks’ two proposals, colonists-to Mars while keeping them in a state of induced torpor. D., is president and chief operating officer of SpaceWorks, Inc., an aerospace design contractor for NASA and the Department of Defense based in Dunwoody, Georgia, just north of Atlanta.
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