GoKawiilAnd into that post-Challenger disillusioned summer of 1986, Hollywood brought us SpaceCamp. It had all the right ingredients: A stacked cast with a solid leading duo (Kate Capshaw and Tom Skerritt), tons of real NASA location footage, and a big, brassy score by none other than John Williams. The film was completed before the Challenger disaster, leaving 20th Century Fox with something of a nightmarish choice on their hands—to shelve the film and lose millions, or send it to theaters and risk a PR disaster.
For better or for worse, Fox chose to release the film, which ultimately made about $9.6 million on a reported $25 million budget. Ouch. Audiences, it seemed, weren’t really interested in watching a bunch of kids in peril on a space shuttle. Today, on the rare occasions SpaceCamp comes up in film discussions at all—usually among geeks of a certain age who encountered it when they were younger—it’s often spoken of with derision. Kids! Robots! Thermal curtain failures! Preposterous!
But is it really a bad movie? It’s not currently available for streaming, but this is exactly the kind of scenario that physical media is made for. And so, with the movie’s 40th anniversary looming, Senior Space Editor Eric Berger and I grabbed the DVD and watched our way through it—and this is what we thought.
Lee: It’s been about 18 hours since we watched SpaceCamp, which is maybe just a bit longer than the kids spent in orbit. What did you think? Are we tearing the film apart here, or praising it?
Eric: We are bearing witness to it, I think. I had never seen the movie before, and as a 53-year-old who has read about and written about space for decades, the movie was clearly not made for me. But for what it was, an ’80s dramedy aimed at kids and teens, I think it did an admirable job of engaging its audience and building interest in the space program. You know, we decided to watch it because I wrote about the real Space Camp a couple of weeks ago, and we’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release in early June. All in all, it was fun to experience. How about you? You watched it a lot as a kid and were right in the key demographic, a pre-teen in Houston. Does it hold up?
Lee: I damn near wore the VHS tape out watching it as a kid, so yeah, I was coming into this with a lot of old memories. It honestly held up a lot better than I was expecting it to! There’s epic levels of cheese—and we’ll get to that—but even in spite of the cheese, I don’t think anyone can deny that there was a lot of love put into this movie. For every huge detail they get wrong (why does the shuttle keep shaking after MECO?), there are countless minor details that they nail. Tiny stuff, that no one except insiders would notice—shuttle cockpit switch positions, authentic uniform patches, terminology. This was not a B-movie—money and care were spent, and that money and care are visible on-screen.
20th Century Fox Kevin (Tate Donovan) separates the SRBs during launch. The shuttle flight deck and mid-deck sets were extremely realistic and built to spec. Kevin (Tate Donovan) separates the SRBs during launch. The shuttle flight deck and mid-deck sets were extremely realistic and built to spec. 20th Century Fox Lee Hutchinson This 2013 image of shuttle Crew Compartment Trainer 2 at the Johnson Space Center shows that Kevin was more or less hitting the right buttons! This 2013 image of shuttle Crew Compartment Trainer 2 at the Johnson Space Center shows that Kevin was more or less hitting the right buttons! Lee Hutchinson Kevin (Tate Donovan) separates the SRBs during launch. The shuttle flight deck and mid-deck sets were extremely realistic and built to spec. 20th Century Fox This 2013 image of shuttle Crew Compartment Trainer 2 at the Johnson Space Center shows that Kevin was more or less hitting the right buttons! Lee Hutchinson
Eric: There were also some cringeworthy details they missed, though. One jarring example for me was a reference to a “180×33” orbit shortly after Atlantis reaches space. I mean, that’s definitely an orbit. But it’s not a stable orbit. 180 miles is pretty low for an apogee to begin with, and 33 miles is, umm, not great. At perigee the shuttle would experience pretty serious atmospheric braking, rapidly lose energy, and would definitely not be going back up to its apogee. It would meet a bad end. Regarding it being a B-movie, all you have to do is look at the cast, a mix of established actors and young up-and-comers (Joaquin Phoenix, lolwut??!) to know that this was a serious effort. But it had poor timing.
Lee: Poor timing is the understatement of the (last) century. SpaceCamp made its theatrical debut on June 6, 1986, barely four months after the very public destruction of Challenger. A movie about a space near-disaster coming so soon on the heels of an actual space disaster proved to be box office poison—which is unfortunate, because there’s a lot to love about SpaceCamp. Especially if you’re a fan of both “space” and “camp.” For folks unfamiliar, the film depicts a group of five kids and a rookie astronaut who are accidentally shot into space when a routine main engine test of the orbiter Atlantis goes sideways. (The root cause of the problem is Joaquin Phoenix’s robotic best friend Jinx, which…well, we’ll get to Jinx in a minute.) Stranded in low Earth orbit without a functioning space-to-ground voice link and with dwindling oxygen, it’s up to lone adult astronaut Andie Bergstrom (Kate Capshaw) and her husband, camp director Zach Bergstrom (Tom Skerritt) to bring the stricken shuttle home. It sounds like an ’80s-flavored recipe for success! And, shot on location at the actual Space Camp facilities in Huntsville and the actual Launch Control Room at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it should have performed well—except for that pesky real-life shuttle explosion.
Credit: 20th Century Fox “Welp.” “Welp.” Credit: 20th Century Fox
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