In order to shoot a realistic film about space travel, director Ron Howard first had to figure out how he was going to depict weightlessness. During a visit to NASA, he learned that real astronauts trained for a weightless environment in NASA’s KC-135 weightless trainer — the “Vomit Comet” — a hollowed-out, windowless, padded Boeing 707 jet that climbs to 30,000 ft. and then arcs into a steep dive, creating a 23-second period of weightlessness. When the jet reaches the bottom of its dive and arcs back up, the zero-gravity environment instantly disappears, becoming a crushing two gravities. As it begins to climb, the passengers and crew hit the deck.

Kevin Bacon recalled, “Ron called me up and said, ‘We’re going up in this zero-g airplane. And it’s for research. You don’t have to go. Absolutely no pressure. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go. Tom’s going to go. Gary’s going to go. Bill’s going to go. I’m going to go.’ You know, everybody was going to go. So, of course, I’m not going to look I’m an idiot. I mean, there is a certain element of my personality that is slightly male.”

To experience the “Vomit Comet,” Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon

and Gary Sinise joined director Ron Howard and producer Todd Hallowell

at Ellington Air Force Base. For their first zero-gravity flight, the

KC-135 flew out to a distant spot in the Gulf of Mexico — remote

waters hundreds of miles from a populated area. That morning, NASA

medics prescribed to each of the “actor-nauts” a potent drug cocktail

of scopolamine and Dexedrine to relieve motion sickness. In the breast

pockets of each man’s suit was what NASA technicians call the “airman’s

corsage” — two plastic bags with sealable tops, just in case.

For the first few dips, the passengers stayed strapped in their

seats. On the fourth one, Paxton unbuckled his restraints and the

others hesitantly followed suit, floating weightless for the first

time. “Bill loved it,” said Ron Howard. “He took to it like a duck to

water. He just absolutely loved being weightless. We all did.”

“I was the wimp,” admitted Kevin Bacon. “I thought we’d go up in the

plane once. We went on 40 zero-g trips.” Before the flight ended, Bacon

and Sinise both lost their lunch.

Afterward, Howard bragged, “Test directors came up and said, ‘You

know, we expected you to be a bunch of Hollywood wimps.'” Hanks said,

“We assured the guys down there that we were kind of up to it, and then

we were saying, ‘Boy, is it possible to put a set in here and shoot

part of a movie?'” Kevin Bacon wasn’t so keen on the idea, but tried to

seem game. “Ron comes to me and says, ‘Well, our stunt coordinator

Mickey Gilbert had an idea. He wants to go up there and film it. I

don’t know if we can do it. We’ll check with NASA.’ I was like, ‘Oh.'”

Producer Todd Hallowell started working the phones, hoping to get

permission to place the Command Module and Lunar Module sets inside the

KC-135 for filming weightless effects. “We kept pushing on this and

finally got it all the way to Washington, to NASA Administrator Dan

Goldin’s office,” said Hallowell. “And they finally came back and said,

‘Well, let’s do that.'”

That was a big relief for Ron Howard. “If we’d had to do it with

wires — if we really would’ve had to try to create the weightlessness

with wires, I shudder to think what the movie would have looked like,”

he said. “Ultimately, every director has to bear the final

responsibility for what goes on in shooting a movie. If I had really

understood before going into it what was involved in shooting in the

KC-135, I might have backed away from it. There were the financial

issues to consider, there were logistical issues, like how we were

going to make the set fit inside the confines of the plane, there was

the simple question of whether it really was possible to stage the

scenes we wanted to stage in a zero-g environment. At a certain point,

I just said, ‘If the actors are willing to give it a try, I’m willing

to. If it works, it’s unprecedented, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.’ I

certainly wasn’t on an irrational mission, but I also knew that no

matter how wonderful the special-effects wizards working on the movie

were, there was no way simulated weightlessness would look as good as

the real thing.”

Watch the DVD-enhanced version of Apollo 13. For a complete schedule of this movie on AMC, click here.

To read more about how Apollo 13 Put the Space Program back in the spotlight, click here.

Sources:

Cindy Pearlman, “The Making of Apollo 13: A Countdown,” Chicago Sun-Times, 6/25/95

Cindy Pearlman, “Space Race,” Chicago Sun-Times, 6/25/95

Jeffrey Kluger, The Apollo Adventure, Pocket Books, 1995

Richard Corliss, “Hell of a Ride,” Time, 7/3/95

Malcolm Jones, Jr., “Out of this World, Really,” Newsweek, 7/3/95

Lynda Jones, “Apollo 13 Takes a Dive,” Science World, 10/6/95

Apollo 13 DVD Extras: Lost Moon Featurette

Apollo 13 DVD Extras: Director Commentary