An exclusive extended trailer of director Ido Mizrahy’s riveting and thought-provoking documentary on NASA’s mission to Mars and the psychological challenges that come with space exploration, Space: The Longest Goodbye, which is now available on PBS Passport and debuts Monday, May 6th on PBS’s Independent Lens (check your local listings), PBS App, and accessible via PBS’s flagship YouTube channel. In the next decade, NASA intends to send astronauts to Mars for the first time. To succeed, crew members must overcome unprecedented life-threatening challenges. And while many of these hazards are physical, the most elusive are psychological.
Throughout their three-year absence, crew members won’t be able to communicate with Earth in real-time due to the immense distance. The psychological impact of this level of disconnectedness and isolation—both from mission control and loved ones—is impossible to predict, endangering the mission itself. Directed to mitigate this threat is Dr. Al Holland, a NASA psychologist whose job is to keep astronauts mentally stable in space.
Space: The Longest Goodbye follows Holland, rookie astronauts Kayla Barron and Matthias Maurer, and former astronaut Cady Coleman, among others, as they grapple with the tension between their dream of reaching new frontiers and their basic human need to stay connected to home. This conflict transcends space travel: how do humans balance the quest for progress with a deep connection to history and each other?
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