大象传媒

The sets and costumes

To ensure that the look of the series felt contemporary and convincing, the series producers turned to the companies that had helped to create some of the most authentic and spectacular space movies of our time.

Wonderworks - the Los Angeles master space set-builder behind Apollo 13, From The Earth To The Moon, Space Cowboys, The Core and The Day After Tomorrow - built and supplied most of the sets for this series.

A modified space shuttle cockpit fitted with a slightly more futuristic 'glass cockpit' formed the Pegasus command centre, and Wonderworks' unique International Space Station set used in The Day After Tomorrow was adapted for the mothership's lab areas.

The sets were shipped across the world and reconstructed at two studios to the west of London.

Some parts were then taken to Russia and rebuilt onboard a cosmonaut training cargo plane to fly real weightless aerobatics.

The Hollywood costume house, Global Effects, who supplied space suits to Apollo 13, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Contact and the TV series Earth To The Moon, designed and built the Venus and Io suits used in this series.

The company also modified their space shuttle EVA (spacewalk) suits from Space Cowboys for the actors' Mars, Pluto and comet scenes.

Working with their technicians in the deserts of Chile and on the planetary surface sets at Pinewood studios, the crew were able to use costumes that are hard to tell from real multi-million dollar suits.

"We merged these ultra-accurate costumes with real cosmonaut space suits in some scenes, and this reflects something we've tried to do throughout the series - fusing reality with mock-ups," explains Chris Riley, series producer.

"I believe we are actually the first TV production to make use of real space suits in a drama."

It wasn't just the costumes that were authentic. Many of the props seen in the drama are also real products developed for missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and supplied to the production by the European Space Agency and Rosaviakosmos (the Russian Space Agency).

From the personal hygiene packs to the food parcels, much that you see on screen is the real thing.

"Plus, by using Nasa and ESA footage shot on-board and outside the ISS, we have tried to blur the boundaries between the real missions and ours even further," says executive producer, Tim Haines.

He continues: "Even the astronauts' dialogue with Mission Control has, in places, been purposely distorted in order to convey the difficulties of communicating across the vast distances of space."

Shaping the look of the series in this way, by combining the best that Hollywood's space movie specialists have to offer with real spacecraft equipment and following the advice of planetary scientists and spacecraft engineers working in the field, the series producers aimed to achieve a look and feel that's hard to distinguish from footage shot on real missions.