Mission Astronaut

Most space documentaries have the luxury of a flat frame to work with. Mission Astronaut didn’t. Built for Europa-Park’s Dome of Dreams, one of the largest mobile digital 360° cinemas in the world, the film had to take genuine NASA and ESA footage, material never shot with a dome in mind, and make it work in a format that surrounds the audience completely.

The film follows astronauts Alexander Gerst, Matthias Maurer, and Thomas Pesquet from the ground up: underwater and centrifuge training that prepares the body for launch, the demands of a spacewalk, the Soyuz launch and docking sequence, and life aboard the International Space Station. Softmachine combined that real footage with CGI to fill the gaps no camera could reach, building a continuous ten-minute experience rather than a stitched-together highlight reel.

That combination, real agency footage grounded in fact, CGI used only where it had to carry the story, is what makes the film work as both entertainment and education. It doesn’t dramatise spaceflight. It shows it, from angles audiences don’t normally get to see.

Why it matters for you: This is proof Softmachine can take existing, high-value footage, archival, scientific, or agency-sourced, and rebuild it into something that genuinely works in an immersive format, rather than just projecting it wide and calling it done.