1 day ago
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Mission to Space with Francis Bourgeois is a tricksy little beast. Unlike, it must be made quite clear, its presenter himself. Bourgeois, for those who have not had the absolute pleasure, is a 25-year-old engineering graduate who came to prominence on social media by making TikTok videos about his great passion: trains. The unforced joy on his face when a locomotive goes by (any locomotive, though his favourite classes are the 37 and 158 and his least favourite the 170), and his ease with his geekiness, quickly made him a star.
His other love, we are told, is space. The animating feature of this overgenerously apportioned documentary (two parts of 45 minutes each) is the question: can a trainspotter become an astronaut?
The answer, too obviously and from the very start of the film, is no. It becomes more and more likely that the makers were labouring under the delusion that to be a passionate geek is synonymous with being a savant. I mean, I get it. I’m an arts grad, too, and anyone who can look at an engine or a sum and make any kind of sense of it seems to me like a god as well. But as Bourgeois meets experts in various aspects of space exploration and we watch him fall flat on his face, sometimes literally, time and time again while he is put through some of the physical paces required of astronauts, the optimistic vibe begins to wear off. Bourgeois begins to look not like the enthusiastic amateur he is (a quality that should be protected at all costs and celebrated for its rarity), but like a young man who has been required by television’s strictures to bite off more than he can chew.
He is thrilled (please always mentally insert the word “genuinely” before any adjective describing him) to meet retired European Space Agency astronaut and Army Air Corps major Tim Peake, who went into space in 2015, at the RAF Centre of Aerospace Medicine, to see how well he withstands G-force. Bourgeois tells him he habitually loses vision if he stands up too quickly. You can see Peake deciding that discretion is the better part of valour as he straps his young charge into the centrifuge. Bourgeois duly passes out almost before he turns the ignition. Or whatever you do with a centrifuge. Like I said – arts grad.
On we go to the US, thanks to an invitation from commercial space flight company Axiom Space (currently building the space station that will take over from the ISS), where Bourgeois’ combination of innate literalness and dry British humour – impossible to tell where one leaves off and the other begins – leads to many awkward silences. Shown the hatch designed to accommodate a range of rocket passenger sizes, he tells his guide, former Axiom chief strategy officer Matt Ondler, that he is relieved because his head circumference at birth was in the 99th percentile. “Interesting,” Ondler murmurs, after a struggle.
At the American College of Hyperbaric Medicine they test his resistance to hypoxia, a condition that occurs when oxygen levels in body tissues are low (a risk to astronauts). It is … negligible. When he is taken on a zero-gravity flight he is violently sick. When his ability to respond to emergencies aboard a space station is tested, he panics and “kills” the pretend patient.
And despite Bourgeois’s sanguine nature and wit, the overall effect – especially spread out over 90 minutes when it could easily have worked at half that – is depressing. There is an attempt to broaden the emotional appeal by considering what it is like for astronauts to leave family and friends behind, but this only results in an awkward encounter with a therapist in which Bourgeois talks about his cat and the therapist is clearly wondering what she’s doing there.
Things take a turn for the better in the last 15 minutes, when Bourgeois “discovers” space engineering and bonds instantly with the passionate geeks who build the stuff that will go into orbit. They talk of valves and revolutions and pressure (“It’s like you’re singing to me!” Bourgeois tells one delightedly), and you wish someone had had the courage to realise that the astronaut-dream stuff was not working and set him to investigate this instead. An enthusiastic amateur with an engineering degree and a gift for communication would have been great to watch. And there would have been no need for a cringe-makingly lyrical voiceover delivered with exhausting brio by Sir Stephen Fry top-and-tailing the programme, either. I hope we see Bourgeois better used in future.
