“For All Mankind” (Source: Apple)
It’s a little hard to get cable on the International Space Station and even satellite TV won’t cut it, but a select collection of shows are available for the astronauts, and they include Apple TV+ series.
It’s apparently possible to get enough of staring out of an ISS window at the Earth, the stars, or the space debris. But astronauts on the space station today can turn to screens and instead watch Apple TV+ hit “For All Mankind.”
Or at least, according to Gizmodo which filed a Freedom of Information Act request to NASA, they can watch the first three seasons. That takes the story up to 1995, but if they want to see what happens in season four, they’ll have to hope Starliner gets fixed and brings them back to Earth.
They do, however, have the full three seasons of “Ted Lasso” to work through, so they can complete becoming steadily less impressed with that show. And they can be left hanging like the rest of us if they complete the first season of “Severance” and have to wait until 2025 for the next.
Also available to the crew are selected seasons of “Friends,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Mandalorian,” and “How I Met Your Mother.”
According to ex-astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, crews are allowed take their iPhones into space. They don’t work as phones, they of course can’t get cell coverage, but astronauts can use them to watch downloaded video and connect to the station’s Wi-Fi.
This would mean they could take into orbit any TV they’ve downloaded beforehand, so there might be a hot trade in swapping iPhones from time to time. But the list of available shows is what NASA has for all crew on the ISS, and it at least used to be that there was a projection TV on board.
That TV was shown in a 2017 NASA photo by Joseph M. Acaba. Earlier, in 2015, Robert Frost — now in the Flight Operations Directorate at NASA — revealed how TV was uploaded to the station via its Ku-band receiver.
Watching TV in Space (Source: NASA Joseph M. Acaba)
“[Astronauts] can’t just flip through the channels, but unused bandwidth of the Ku-band comm system can be used to uplink realtime video files and video via Internet,” he wrote on Quora. “It can also be used to uplink video files of movies and television shows for delayed viewing.”
“One of the things the crew can do, before launch,” he continued, “is to give the flight controllers a list of movies and television shows they would like to have on board.”
Consequently, it appears that the shows listed by NASA are ones requested by the crew. And also that if they ask nicely, NASA could upload season four of “For All Mankind” in between mission transmissions.
