Spaceballs

Those resourceful souls at https://shootingpeople.org have got hold of NASA’s list of the videos available for the astronauts on board the International Space Station (unless it’s a spoof – needless to say I haven’t checked properly). Naturally, the list has much blackly comic potential, not least with such fate-tempting titles as:

2010: The Year We Make Contact
Armageddon
Black Hawk Down
Breach
Cast Away
Crash
Gone With the Wind
Die Hard With A Vengeance
Legends of the Fall
Man on Fire
Mission Impossible III
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Something’s Gotta Give
Star Wars I-VI
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Tombstone

Interestingly, Armageddon features a Russian astronaut who’s gone crazy after spending months alone on a space station. It’s probably just as well that the library doesn’t contain the all-time-greatest ‘going-mad-on-a-space-station’ film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris or such guaranteed paranoia-inducers as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien, although they do have a copy of Ron Howard’s more redemptive Apollo 13. The Space Station’s library of books is pretty interesting as well – loads of science fiction, with Isaac Asimov ranking as most popular author. Neatly inverting the space theme, however, they also have a copy of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.