Do you think any Bollywood movie has been shot at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)? Surprisingly, yes! One of them was ‘Swades’, and another one was planned to be filmed at NASA but it didn’t materialize (you will be shocked to hear the director’s name).
Films Shot in NASA Research Centers
I’m sure most of you would have guessed this one. Swades, featuring Shah Rukh Khan (directed by Ashutosh Gowariker) was the first Indian film to be actually shot inside the NASA research center.
In the film, Shah Rukh Khan’s character Mohan Bhargava is a NASA scientist working on a rainfall monitoring satellite known as the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), which is lifted into an orbit aboard a Space Shuttle.
For authenticity, the director Ashutosh Gowariker shot a scene at Launch Pad 39A, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.
Did you know that Akshay Kumar’s Housefull 2 (directed by Sajid Khan and produced by Sajid Nadiadwala) was supposed to have scenes that were to be shot at NASA’s Weightlessness Chamber (few Hollywood films have been shot in this chamber). For the movie, director Sajid Khan had thought of a comic sequence where the actors would be suspended in the air and had to cross each other’s paths. Because cables would get entangled, they had thought of shooting in the Weightlessness Chamber of NASA. However, the plans were later shelved.
Watch: Lisa Spence, flight analog project manager for NASA’s Human Research Program, talks about a crew of four women conducting a 30-day-long simulation of a two-year mission to an asteroid using the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
