Scott Kelly recently returned to the International Space Station — during a trip to Berlin.
The first American astronaut to spend more than 500 days off the planet, including nearly a year aboard the space station during his fourth and final spaceflight in 2016, Kelly was in Germany when he stepped back into his exotic home away from home.
"The outside was just plywood, but the inside looked better than the space station training mockup we have at the Johnson Space Center," said Kelly in an interview with collectSPACE. "Well, not functionally, but appearance-wise it looked much more like the real thing."
"But then, the one at NASA was designed for different things," he said.
The almost full-scale space station at Studio Babelberg was built to film the off-Earth scenes in "Constellation," the new psychological thriller now streaming on Apple TV+. The production spent five weeks on the space station set capturing sequences that were set within the microgravity environment of the orbiting laboratory, including a mysterious accident that propels the series' main storyline.
"They really wanted it to look real," said Kelly. "I tried to have them put a lot of junk in it, like cables and boxes and power supplies, and they did as much of that as they could. They even put food and coffee stains on the walls, like there are on the space station, trying to make it as realistic as possible."
Related: 'Constellation' season 1 episode 4 review: Compelling drama makes up for a thin mystery
