This is really how big it is, it is not very big.'' He said, 'Wow, you guys really did an amazing job! This really feels like it. 'His response was immediate and really positive,' Shaffner said of Massimino's impression of the spacecraft. Massimino reprised his role on the show for a couple of the 'space'-based episodes. Having a real astronaut on the set offered a chance for some immediate feedback. 'They studied and really did a remarkable job with acting the weightlessness,' he said. The actors also deserve some credit, said Shaffner, for mastering the motions of microgravity. 'There was a very long, sort of skinny platform that a person could lie on and it would almost look like they were swimming through in weightlessness.' 'It was done by supporting the people from underneath,' Shaffner said. Rather than raise the roof and suspend the actors by wires, the solution came from below. Part of that was made possible by the way they achieved the appearance of weightlessness. 'We really examined ways we could reimagine the spaces we added,' Shaffner said. They also added a section to the rented module to allow other actors - the other station crew members - to enter and exit, giving viewers a sense that a sprawling outpost continued beyond the lab. With only 20 feet or so (6 meters) of space station set to work with, Shaffner got together with the directors, visual effects supervisors and cinematographers to use unique camera angles and creative framing to create more 'space' than there really was. So, I got one of those and we labeled it 'food warmer.'' Wireless weightlessness 'They even had this sort of Halliburton case, or it looked like a Halliburton case, that was a food warmer, somehow - I can't imagine how that worked. 'There were camera lenses for some reason, there were toothbrushes, pens, family photographs and lots and lots of different cases of things,' she said. 'I watched the video of the station probably 20 times, trying to pick out all these different things and there were so many surprises in the stuff you saw attached to the walls with velcro so they wouldn't float around.'

'I collected things that looked like what was in the actual space station,' Shea told collectSPACE.

Shea's challenge was making it look lived in, like the orbiting complex. Let me make sure we can put it on hold,' which I did immediately,' Shaffner recalled.įrom the outside, WonderWorks' space station set for rent looks more like an elongated shipping crate, but inside are the replica science and equipment racks, panels and hand holds that form the general layout and appearance of the real space station's laboratory module. 'So when the call came this summer from the producers that we need the space station, I was able to immediately say 'Well guess what? No fear. In the course of his seeking out the Soyuz, however, Shaffner found a space station. 'The first thing that we always do in this business is ask, 'Well, can we rent it? Did somebody make one first?' And unfortunately, we discovered that there weren't any Soyuz replicas to be found,' Shaffner told in an interview.įor the Soyuz, Shaffner and Shea received photos from NASA, turned to a Kansas museum to find dimensions and scavenged parts from an aerospace junkyard in Los Angeles to piece together a realistic capsule. When The Big Bang Theory's fifth season finale called for Wolowitz to launch on a Russian Soyuz capsule, Shaffner went looking for one. Scavenging for space partsĪs it turns out, you can rent a space station, but not a Russian spacecraft.

Behind the scenes, the job of delivering Wolowitz to the orbiting outpost didn't fall to a Russian rocket, but rather to production designer John Shaffner, set decorator Ann Shea and their teams.

Kite liberator episode 1 space station