Space Queens: A Place in Space is a documentary by 2019 BA(Hons) Television alumnus, Adam Smith. It is a sequel to a 2019 film Adam produced for his final year project and explores how far women have come in aerospace, as well as the struggles they still face.
The film features interviews with an array of stars including NASA astronaut Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, astronomer Samaneh Shamyati and SpaceX engineer Flora Quinby.
Adam filmed the original Space Queens throughout his final year studying at the University. This coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Space mission and the documentary took an in-depth look at the women who contributed to the amazing feat.
Thanks to a grant from the Santander Universities Mobility Fund, Adam was able to take a two-week trip to Florida to film within NASA’s headquarters and the Kennedy Space Centre. He interviewed Christina Korp, former manager of Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, alongside NASA civil engineer Barbara Kennedy, and Mimi Aung, project lead at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in California.
The follow-up, Space Queens: A Place in Space, seeks to remind us all how we are all connected in the universe. It accompanies the announcement of Artemis, NASA’s next mission which aims to land the first woman and the next man on the surface of the moon in 2024.
Space Queens: A Place in Space is showing exclusively on Amazon Prime for UK and US audiences.
Adam talks more about the documentary below.
When did your interest in space start?
I’ve always been interested in looking up.
I’m driven by curiosity - I would go camping a lot as a child, so the skies were clear, not like in Edinburgh where I grew up. I like to know how things work. How did the stars get there, what do the different constellations mean? How can we get up there?
My Grandmother would take me and my younger cousins to the Edinburgh Science Festival every year when I was in school, I was always interested in the robots and space stuff, but my feet would get sore from walking around all day so I would usually have to sit down.
Why did you decide to make a sequel?
Space Queens part one looked at where we’ve been as humanity; part two looks at where humanity can go if we remove barriers like gender, societal norms and just give hope to people. Luckily, since its release the momentum has just continued to grow really. There’s a real appetite - I think - for this kind of content, that puts women in the driver's seat. I often feel out of place as cis-male, making these films but I like to think that I’m still contributing in some way.
Space Queens: A Place in Space was made during Covid-19 restrictions. How did the filmmaking process compare to the first film?
Everything had to be done remotely, so that was totally different for me as a filmmaker. I’ve never experienced anything like that. I hate chasing people up, I get very British about things like sending emails when deadlines have passed, or someone hasn’t sent something in. There’s no real way to tell an astronaut to hurry up - she’s been in space - you haven’t.
Then you also have to teach people how to film. A lot of people who wouldn’t normally film themselves are using cameras now for interviews, so that’s been interesting, but if you take the technical aspect out of it, the overall vibe has been the same - wrangling clever women, sending a thousand emails, hours of editing and then the weeks of promo.