NASA misses a chance to promote the best-ever ad for the space station

The movie A Beautiful Planet lives up to its name. Earth is a planet, it is beautiful, and arguably it has never looked this good before. To capture imagery for this IMAX movie, NASA delivered 4K cameras to the space station in 2014, marking the first time 4K resolution cameras have been used to make a commercial film in orbit. Nevertheless, if you’re remotely interested in space, you’ve probably seen images and videos like these before.

That’s because astronauts have been taking amazing photos of planet Earth, with increasingly sophisticated cameras, during the 15 years the International Space Station has given them a semi-permanent platform to do so. Two years ago, NASA even activated several commercial HD video cameras on the exterior of the station to provide around-the-clock views of the planet in high definition. Earth—our pale blue dot, the cradle of humanity, an oasis of life in a cold, dark universe—has become an easy story to tell.

What has proven far more difficult for NASA and journalists to capture is the immensity and scope of the International Space Station. Even though it flies only a few hundred miles above Earth, the station still advances human spaceflight. Yet the station remains an abstract concept when compared to something as concrete as a rocket launch or a space shuttle. Is the station a tin can? Is it cramped? Just what is it like to live aboard?

Some astronauts, such as Chris Hadfield, made names for themselves during their six-month stints in orbit with clever YouTube videos about life on the space station. But even these views are limited in scope and clarity. For me, then, the true star of A Beautiful Planet is not Earth—with its storms, continents, volcanoes, coral reefs, and city lights—or even the Aurora Borealis, but the International Space Station, revealed in its glory by a Canon EOS C500 4K Digital Cinema Camera and EOS-1D C 4K cameras.

A Beautiful Planet is at its best when focused on life aboard the station. Its crew includes Butch Wilmore, a star linebacker in college, struggling to get his large frame out of his spacesuit. Later, the Southerner quips that he speaks three languages: English, Russian, and Tennessee. Station commander Terry Virts reveals how astronauts shower in space when he washes his hair on camera, a process I hadn’t seen or really understood before. Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti delights in showing off an Italian-made espresso machine before drinking from an “experimental” cup in microgravity.

These three astronauts provide A Beautiful Planet with much of its commentary, but others—such as NASA’s Kjell Lindgren and Scott Kelly, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency—appear as well. Little time was set aside in the crew’s schedules to capture footage, so much of what we see was shot outside of the long hours the crew spend each day tending to the station, working on experiments, or exercising to ensure they don’t lose too much muscle while in free fall.

Why doesn't NASA promote the film more? It's impossible to come away from A Beautiful Planet without being impressed by the orbiting laboratory and the international collaboration that constructed it. But where is the audience? My home is Houston—Space City—where astronauts live and the space station program is managed. But when the movie played here, it did so in one theater, on one screen, for a single week. When I attended, just a few astronauts and their friends and families were in the audience. As of last Sunday, A Beautiful Planet had grossed less than $1 million in box office sales across the country.

That's a shame. A Beautiful Planet is a great missed opportunity for NASA to promote not some evanescent Journey to Mars but the real thing. On the space station, NASA is laying the cornerstones of a future international exploration program. It is ensuring astronauts can survive for long periods in microgravity. It is growing food. It is testing closed-loop systems like water recycling. It is providing a toe-hold for the commercial space industry to test out business plans in low-Earth orbit. In short, this is the cutting edge of spaceflight in 2016. And it has never looked better or more real.

Listing image by IMAX Corporation