Review ‘Space: The Longest Goodbye’: Only up there

In “Space: the longest goodbye,” Scientists investigating the problems of long-term space exploration are going further than films have gone before. Send astronauts into hibernation to save scarce resources? Link them to an artificially intelligent entity that can act as a friend and sounding board? Screenwriters have tried these things, and the results are probably best preserved in fiction.

But such gambits could provide real solutions to getting humans to Mars. And it’s gambles that this whimsically intriguing, sometimes wide-eyed documentary, directed by Ido Mizrahy, takes seriously.

“Soft, gentle people are completely inscrutable to engineers,” says Jack Stuster, an anthropologist who asked residents of the International Space Station to keep diaries. One of the key interviewees is Al Holland, a psychologist who has created a unit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to provide support to astronauts. He discusses his 2010 experience advising on the Chilean mining disaster, which had striking parallels to the isolation of life in space.

We hear about it too Kayla Barron, a submarine warfare officer who decided to go into space, and her husband, who stayed behind; as a military couple they were used to living apart, but this presented another challenge. And we see snippets of personal video chats that astronaut Cady Coleman had with her husband and son on Earth, through a system that sometimes didn’t work. “It’s hard for me to really realize how hard it was for a little kid to have to be so patient,” she recalls in the documentary.

On Mars missions, distance will make comparable real-time communication impossible, meaning astronauts won’t even have such intermittent contact. “Space: The Longest Goodbye” leaves open the question of whether someone could make it to the red planet with their sanity intact.

Space: the longest goodbye
Not judged. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy most major platforms.