Space is like baseball: if it were easy, everybody would do it. But space isn’t easy, which is why fewer than 600 people have ever gone there. The rest of us more or less have always had to guess what it would be like to be off the planet—but that is about to change. Virtual reality and augmented reality have made more and more inaccessible places and experiences accessible to everyone, and those experiences now include life aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
In December 2018, TIME, in collaboration with Felix & Paul in Montreal, sent the first 3D 360º VR camera to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo vessel. Based on a 3D 360º camera called the Z-Cam Pro, the VR camera system was effectively invented for space, and developed by Felix & Paul Studios in collaboration with NanoRacks, a designer and builder of cubesats—or miniature satellites. Not only did a camera with so much capability have to be lightweight, it also had to be easy to use and operable in zero-g, where hardware can behave very differently from the way it does under the influence of gravity.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques was the first ISS crew member to assemble and use the camera, and he has found it less a piece of hardware than a sort of oddly Earthly presence. "The virtual reality camera differs from every other camera we have on board," he said to TIME, "mainly because of its technology of course, being a three hundred and sixty degree camera. But from a psychological point of view as a crew member, it feels like you are talking to someone."
Viewers will have that intimate sense too. "Space Explorers: The ISS Experience" will be distributed on VR platforms and part of a traveling exhibit starting in 2020. In all, the episodes will provide a total of 120 minutes of content, including at least one spacewalk. That will not only make the ISS accessible to viewers, it will also make it understandable.
The space station, says Saint-Jacques, "is a big mystery for a lot of people. What is it actually like to live in microgravity in an orbital laboratory? The main topics that have been covered [in the material recorded so far] have been logs of our experiences—descriptions of tasks and demonstrations of actual work and what do we do up here."
More important, VR content can provide people who have never been to space at least a flicker of the transformative "overview effect" that astronauts describe—the ability to see the planet from outside the protective skin of the atmosphere. With that, many veterans of space have said, has come a new appreciation of the breakability and improbability of a living planet surviving in the killing void of space.
"Looking at the Earth from space is really awe-inspiring," says Saint-Jacques. "She’s graceful, beautiful. She’s at once strong, yet fragile. And the only place where we can live really, our only home in the cosmos, the spacecraft for billions of humans."
It's that sense, the spacecraft sense—the idea that, guess what, you are a space traveler even if you never knew it—that the TIME and Felix & Paul Studios collaboration will capture most. The journey will begin soon, and we're all part of the crew.