Space cadets real-life reality show - like truman show, but a hoax

Who made it?

Channel 4. British TV.
It was filmed mostly on Gret Britain
Called "greatest television hoax ever"
space shuttle was sorrounded by big screens, every thing they saw was F/X, television wizardry
presented by Johnny Vaughan
created by Endemol (those that made Big Brother)

Contestants:
9 or 10 people, selected most naive (or, "by suggestability") "Suggestibility is a psychological term that has no link with intelligence or gullibility. People who have a creative mind tend to be quite suggestible. All the tests we did have been done in conjunction with a psychologist," said show executive producer.
The naives are, among others:

Those three "won" the show:
- Keri Hasset, administrator, Birminghham
- Paul French, aged 26, from Bristol
- Billy Jackson, agd 25, from Kent
There were three more people, actors, on the space shuttle: one cting as first-time sstronaut, and two as seasoned astronauts.

Tasks given to contestansts:

organizing ceremony for a dog(!) called Mr Bimby (they were told he is Russian celebrity)

The shuttle

Taken form a movie "Space Cowboys" (with Clint Eastwood)

based on a Nasa blueprint

has a laboratory, mid-deck and cockpit

lanched from russian space-port. Well, uhm, Russians do not use shuttles :-)

Why they thought the were in space?

Gravity - although they fell gravity, they might thogth it's like in Star Trek - a movie series about space, in which gravity in spce shuttles exists.
They were also told, that their craft took off horizontally, not vertically, like this of Richard Branson. Naive, isn't it?
And on low-altitude orbit there is a gravity, and you can not float around. Only 62 miles is a Near Space, not Deep Space, where they would float. ROTFL

Trip to russia - the were circling over Great Britain a few hours in night in a helicopter, so the thought they were flying to Russia.

And if we were going to space and they were weighing us for our health, they wouldn't use scales like you get at home, would they? - asked one contestant (Paul).

One fifth of what they learned in training was fiction. The rest (4/5) was truth.

Various links: Robert Kiosaki Samuel Beckett