SPACE CADETS
(from Zeppotron)

Channel 4 and Zeppotron made TV history in December 2005 by visiting the final frontier – sending a lucky group of starry-eyed applicants into space on their very own shuttle.

The hand-picked group received two weeks of intensive training in Russia courtesy of STAR (Space Tourism Agency of Russia) before being flown 100 kilometres up into near space by two highly-experienced astronauts. Here, they spent five days orbiting the earth, conducting experiments, eating, sleeping, or just looking out of the window and quite literally watching the world go by. There was just one problem. Unbeknown to them, they weren’t in space at all…

They weren’t even in Russia. They were in a building on a disused army base at a secret location somewhere in the UK, as Johnny Vaughan presented SPACE CADETS, the most audacious, complicated and ambitious practical joke in television history.

After weeks of rigorous training, the space tourists made their way, via a network of tunnels, onto a purpose-built ‘shuttle’ that was their home for the five-day flight. Here, they experienced all the noise, turbulence, excitement and beauty of a space mission. They were even able to look out of the window and see the glory of the Cosmos, courtesy of some cutting edge Imax technology, and were also be asked to perform some unusual and increasingly bizarre experiments in the name of scientific research.

The final episode saw the cadets embark on a spectacular space walk…into a TV studio and the realization that their orbit had been a little closer to the London Orbital than they’d been led to believe.

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