Apple's Constellation Is Based on Real Astronauts' Unexplained Spooky Space Stories

The cast and crew of Constellation descended upon the Television Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena on Monday to preview Apple TV+'s latest sci-fi drama. 

The panelists included creator Peter Harness, director Michelle MacLaren, and stars Noomi Rapace, Jonathan Banks, James D'Arcy, and Will Catlett. Together, they previewed what to expect from the genre-blending conspiracy thriller.

After a fatal accident onboard the International Space Station, Jo Ericsson (Rapace), a Swedish astronaut with the European Space Agency, finds herself at the center of an international cover-up that spans across decades. There's a mysterious, massively powerful experimental device onboard the I.S.S. that quantum physicist Henry Caldera (Banks) prioritizes over the lives of the astronauts, and another secret that's been hidden since before the fall of the Soviet Union that Jo inadvertently unearths. And after returning to Earth, something is going on inside Jo's head that is making her question her own sanity. She's experiencing visions and time distortions. Why does her daughter smell different? Is she not her daughter at all? Is Jo losing her mind, or are her hallucinations a side effect of exposure to Caldera's device? 

The show has elements of sci-fi, horror, and psychological thriller, which emerged naturally out of the premise. Harness said that the show grew out of his fascination with what happens to astronauts after they come back from space, both physically and mentally. Their eyesight is much worse, and they've aged at a different rate. Their very DNA is altered. And that's saying nothing about the psychological effects of being off the planet, away from everything they know. 

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"I also kind of began to understand that there were these spooky stories about what astronauts go through in space," Harness said. "They hear dogs barking, sometimes they see weird things outside the capsules. Obviously, that's a sci-fi show, but that has spooky elements in it as well, and that leads almost naturally into a conspiracy about this factor being covered up." 

But ultimately, the most important thing to Harness was the relatable human story of a mother and daughter trying to connect with each other. 

"One of the things that attracted me to this project was that Peter wrote different genres into the story, and that was really exciting and challenging," MacLaren added. She said the producers wanted the show to be very emotionally grounded in order to help people emotionally relate to the characters. "The more you get your audience to connect to the reality of it, the more we get to take you on an adventure." 

A large part of the sense of reality is in Constellation's zero-gravity scenes, which were filmed on a set that's an exact replica of the I.S.S. They didn't exactly shoot in zero-g, but it was still an intense physical experience that involved being wired to the ceiling and acting as if they were floating around. "I trained for a couple of months before, I had to work on my core strength and my balance, my body control," Rapace said. The first time she met Jonathan Banks, she had just come down from the wire. She wanted to give him a hug, but she was too sweaty from the exertion, so she just "grabbed" him. 

The goal was to keep the effects as practical as possible, to make it feel like the viewer is in space with the characters, experiencing the claustrophobia of being in the space station. 

Consultant Scott Kelly also helped with the space realism. Kelly is a former commander of the I.S.S., and he advised the actors that "less is more," according to Will Catlett, who plays an American astronaut. If they pushed too hard in zero-g, for example, they would shoot across the station at 30 miles an hour. 

Kelly informed the show in another way, too. He is an identical twin, and his brother, Mark, was also an astronaut (he's now the junior senator from Arizona). Jonathan Banks plays identical twin former astronauts, the aforementioned science executive Henry Caldera as well as Bud Caldera, an astronaut who has been haunted for decades by a mission gone wrong. The similarities end there, but it just goes to show that even the wildest parts of Constellation have some grounding in reality.

Constellation premieres Wednesday, Feb. 21 on Apple TV+.