[FPSPACE] TV's Final Frontier - Washington Post

[Dwayne Allen Day]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59572-2000Sep12.html

TV's Final Frontier

NBC will try to bolster its sagging ratings by getting some poor slob to
cash it in--oops, head into outer space--on a Russian spacecraft on
prime-time television. Eat your heart out, Paddy Chayefsky.

The GE-owned network has agreed to shell out $40 million to Mark Burnett,
the guy behind CBS's reality hit "Survivor," for the right to broadcast his
latest brainchild: "Destination Mir." The show will follow a dozen American
couch-cosmonauts through a real-life "space camp" in Russia in their bid to
win a trip into space. Each week one contestant will be eliminated from
training by Russian space officials.

Then, in a live two-hour conclusion--and bet the farm it'll happen during a
sweeps period--the finalists will assemble on the launch platform and the
lucky winner will be chosen, packed into a Soyuz spacecraft and blasted
toward the space station Mir, hundreds of miles from Earth.

NBC will follow the winner's journey, the visit to Mir and the eventual--we
hope--return to Earth.

Think Richard Hatch jettisoned into the cosmic emptiness.

"We can't wait to begin on this project, which will literally be out of
this world," said NBC entertainment division President Garth Ancier.

Ancier said he wasn't worried about the safety of the contest winner--he
says space travel is safer than taking a plane trip. Burnett claims it's
safer than the Australian Outback, where his next "Survivor" will be set,
because the Outback is "nature" while outer space is--not.

Not exactly true, says Peggy Wilhide, chief of public affairs for the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Burnett had originally
pitched the idea of partnering on this show with NASA. While NASA is under
pressure from Congress to open outer space to the masses, agency officials
decided that a partnership in a game show might not be the best use of
taxpayer dollars and they took a pass.

Wilhide says that space flight is still risky. According to NASA
calculations, there is a 1-in-438 chance of a major problem on the U.S.
space shuttle. That compares with a 1-in-20,000 chance of a problem in
military aerial combat, and a 1-in-2 million chance of a major accident on
a commercial airliner. She had no stats on the relative danger of
encountering deadly kangaroos in the Outback.

There's also no denying that the Mir, which is older than some television
executives, has a reputation as a rattletrap, having suffered a serious
collision, a fire and multiple equipment and system failures in recent
years. However, a spokesman for MirCorp and those who have flown aboard Mir
say reports of its jalopyhood have been somewhat exaggerated.

Astronauts contacted by The Post about this groundbreaking TV show
expressed confidence in the Russians' proven ability to run a space station
and to transport people safely to and from.

Besides, says astronaut Dave Wolf, who flew aboard Mir for 128 days in the
winter of 1997-98, most risks encountered there can be handled.

"There are few immediate catastrophic failures that can occur in minutes,"
he said reassuringly. "You can retreat in the Soyuz in five to 10 minutes"
and plummet back to Earth.

No problem.

While Wolf was aboard Mir, he reports, "on three occasions we lost all
systems and navigation control for over 24 hours each time. It's not
immediately life-threatening." But, he said, it's really helpful if
everyone on board knows what he's doing.

So how, you're thinking, did broadcast television get to this point?

It started when the network's big cheese Faye Dunaway--um, GE Chairman Jack
Welch--blasted William Holden, er, NBC West Coast President Scott Sassa,
because it had totally missed out on the reality-TV gold rush that had
brought ratings riches to CBS with "Survivor" and ABC with "Who Wants to Be
a Millionaire." Welch even considered giving Sassa and Ancier the boot. Of
course he did--we saw Chayefsky's "Network."

Sassa and Ancier responded by snatching the reality series "Chains of
Love," in which a woman is chained to four guys, then lets them go one at a
time until only one is left, whom she dates.

But that didn't seem like it would fill the bill. So when Burnett, still
basking in the glow of the 52 million viewers who had tuned in to the final
episode of "Survivor," sent out a proposal for "Destination Mir," which
involved sharing a significant chunk of the advertising revenue with him,
the other networks came back with counterproposals.

"But NBC said--yes," Burnett says with a chuckle.

About half of the $40 million price tag is marked for MirCorp, the Russian
company formed early this year to help Mir's operators save the station by
commercializing it. MirCorp charges about $20 million for its "citizen
explorer flights" of seven to 10 days.

Burnett isn't the only one who dreamed of cashing in on having non-pros
vacation at Mir. In 1991, a female British candy factory chemist won a
contest sponsored by the London-based Moscow Narodny Bank and spent eight
days in orbit on Mir with four cosmonauts.

A Japanese broadcasting company reportedly paid $14 million to send one of
its journalists to Mir. And earlier this summer, former U.S. aerospace
engineer and businessman Dennis Tito entered training at Russia's Star
City--the same place NBC's wannabe space people will go--for a planned
flight to Mir next year. (As part of its deal with Burnett, NBC has agreed
to broadcast a Burnett-produced documentary about Tito's space travels.)

One of the biggest challenges faced by any space-traveling would-be TV star
will be the zero-G loo, with its "integrated water recovery systems,
purification columns, pressures and pumps," says Wolf. Astronaut Norm
Thagard agrees. He ought to know; he flew aboard Mir for almost four months
in 1995. The zero-G loo is really tough to master; you have to train for
weeks, but there's still no way to simulate one on Earth. "They really
won't appreciate that till they get there," he forecast.