Kayak on Titan? Soar past exoplanets? Epic new NASA video envisions future space travel

A new NASA video advertises a suite of its real-life missions as previewing an "Exoplanet Travel Bureau" of the future.

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A new NASA video advertises a suite of the agency's real-life missions as previewing an "Exoplanet Travel Bureau" of the future.

The one-minute short on YouTube, released Oct. 19, reimagines a set of exploration posters released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2015 and in 2016 as animated futuristic mini-adventures. (The posters themselves were inspired by art that the Works Progress Administration commissioned to advertise United States national parks between 1936 and 1943, attempting to boost employment during the Depression.)

In the new video from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, a skydiver plunges towards the huge super-Earth HD 40307 g, a family in a bubble-like spacecraft watches the icy moon Enceladus blast out water geysers, and a parent and child watch a rocket lift off from their Martian settlement, among other imaginative ways in which future humans experience worlds near Earth.

A still from a new NASA video imagines what it would be like to float over the lava-covered exoplanet 55 Cancri e. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KBRwyle) and NASA/JPL-Caltech)

As for Mars, the earliest NASA might send people there is 2035 — but that was an estimate released under the previous administration in October 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic and a presidential election changed the constraints and priorities of the U.S. government. Technological, legal and funding delays are also slowing Artemis, which is waiting on key equipment such as spacesuits and human landing systems to proceed.

With the new video, Goddard also advertised a link to NASA's new Exoplanet Travel Bureau website, which reframes the agency's ongoing exploration as a set of extraterrestrial tourism opportunities. Along with the JPL posters, the website includes a new set of posters featuring planet-hunting NASA observatories past, present and future: the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Kepler telescope, and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

A behind-the-scenes video Goddard released separately on YouTube shows how the new video animations were performed using actors and a green screen, which is a backdrop placed in the background of a camera shot to allow for digital effects, background images and other post-production changes.