New Netfilx film on historic Nasa-SpaceX flight is ‘a human story’, astronaut says, that should attract space fans and casual viewers

Astronaut Doug Hurley, who was on the May 2020 launch, says Return to Space is much more than just a typical ‘Hey, we went to space movie’

Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, Oscar winners in 2019 for Free Solo, said Covid gave the unique opportunity to include more intimate footage

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Astronauts Doug Hurley (left) and Bob Behnken before their historic flight in May 2020 on the Dragon 2 space capsule, a joint venture between Nasa and SpaceX, as seen in the Netflix documentary Return To Space. Photo: Netflix / TNS

Published: 4:15pm, 9 Apr 2022

Doug Hurley says it was no big deal when he and fellow astronaut Bob Behnken were told that a documentary film crew would be shadowing their 2020 flight to the International Space Station.

After all, Hurley had piloted the final flight of the space shuttle Atlantis in 2011 with nonstop coverage of the end of the space shuttle programme.

He and Behnken were to be the first American astronauts to return to space from US soil since then, so to Hurley, it was all part of the job as Nasa and SpaceX neared success in their historic public-private partnership.

“Going through the process of building this human spaceship with SpaceX, this was just part of it, frankly,” Hurley says. “And selfishly, it’s wonderful to have it documented because you just forget too much.

“There’s so much going on. Leading to the mission. The mission itself is a blur in so many ways. All three of my space flights have been that way.

“So to have that ability now to go back and relive it, and then maybe, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that now, that’s wonderful.’”