Recently, a NASA official confirmed to Inverse that astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) will get to watch Star Wars: The Last Jedi in low Earth orbit. As if that wasn’t already enviable enough, the same NASA spokesperson now tells us how astronauts get to watch their impressive selection of movies on board the ISS.
“Movies will be sent up digitally so no physical copy was on Dragon for today’s [SpaceX] launch,” Daniel Hout, a NASA spokesperson at the Johnson Space Center,” says. “No updates on timing, only that it will be seen after the movie has been released — so sometime after today.”
Expedition 45's classic team poster, which pays tribute to Star Wars, because obviously.
Of course, this isn’t the first movie to be screened on board the ISS — hell, it isn’t even the first Star Wars movie to be shown there.
“Astronauts have the ability to watch movies during downtime,” Hout explains. “They have shared some of their viewing experiences in the past via their social media accounts. The last Star Wars was also sent to the crew.
NASA has not-so-subtly flexed about this in the past. Astronauts and the ISS’s official account have tweeted images of movies playing on the projection screen on board the space station. This is a big step up from the days of yore — like, the late ‘00s — in which astronauts could only watch movies on their laptops.
Astronauts have a pretty extensive selection of movies to watch besides the latest Star Wars. Back in 2015, Gizmodo writer Matt Novak filed a Freedom of Information Act request and found the complete list of films and TV shows on board the ISS. The crew’s got everything from 2 Fast 2 Furious to 2001: A Space Odyssey, so if staring out the windows into the vacuum of space ever gets boring, they can watch a group of street racers drive cars around for some reason.
While (almost) none of us will ever get the chance to watch a movie in space, nevermind Star Wars, we can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that we’ll catch The Last Jedi before astronauts.
