Astronomical jealousy as crewmates envy Bullock friendship

The female astronaut who advised Sandra Bullock on how to portray movements in space for her role in Gravity says her male crewmates were jealous of her regular chats with the Hollywood star.

Space traveller and scientist Cady Coleman gave tips directly from the International Space Station spinning around Earth in order to give the actress an insight into weightlessness.

But Coleman, 53, who spent 159 days on the station and is also a veteran of two space shuttle missions, said her colleagues were miffed that they did not get to chat to the screen star.

She said: “I would say, I talked to her last night, and one of the guys, Ron, would go ‘did she ask about me?’.”

The astronaut was speaking at the launch of a Channel 4 season of programmes about space which will see the broadcaster screening live from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth. She will be among the team working on the broadcast.

Speaking from Houston, Texas, the home of Nasa’s Mission Control, Coleman said she hooked up with the actress by chance three years ago through a family connection.

“We talked about things like ‘how do you move up there, what force does it take and would you stop with your feet?’ and it made me think about everything I was doing.

“I was getting close to coming home — I was about six weeks from coming home and in a way it made me re-evaulate everything I was doing because I was thinking of how to express that to somebody else — I did some audio clips for her. We only spoke a few times but I made little audio clips. The other guys on the crew, we would talk about it at dinner, things she wanted to know.

“It was actually a really neat thing for the whole crew,” she said.

* Channel 4 broadcasts its Live From Space: Lap of the Planet, which will be screened at 7.30pm on March 16.