Apparently, the Avatar and Terminator director has been interested in visiting space for a while, and got about halfway there back in the late '90s/early '00s. Speaking to MTV, Cameron said he had been working with NASA on a joint mission to the International Space Station; unfortunately, that got sidetracked by a number of delays, including a certain terrorist attack.
"I was going to go up and work on the International Space Station with our 3-D cameras," Cameron said. "I was pushing for something in the 30 day range and they were pushing for something in the 10 to 15 day range. We got partway down the road on that and, it was interesting, we were testing our 3-D cameras at the Titanic wreck site and September 11 happened. I wasn't prepared at that exact moment in my life, with a family, to go live in Russia for 12 months, which is what it was going to take to do all the training. so I held off."
He added that as the project was starting to ramp up again, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members.
"I was on the NASA Advisory Council at that time. My first meeting of the NASA Advisory Council was right after the Columbia accident. My first official duty was to go to the memorial service in Washington,"Cameron said.
After that tragedy, Cameron said interest in the mission flagged once more. But now, nearly seven years later, with funding for the International Space Station possibly running out in another half-decade, shooting in space could be extremely vital for the future of space exploration.
"It's not the craziest thing in history," Cameron said about filming a narrative set in outer space, "because the International Space Station is not currently planned to be funded beyond 2015. They've barely gotten the thing built, and now they have to have commercial people come in and figure out how to use [it]. So yeah, I absolutely think there's the possibility of something like that."
"The other thing is that NASA is looking now more toward the commercial sector to provide resupply to the space station and human transport," he added. "Their next human transport system isn't going to be online until 2016 or 2017. They were supposed to be online in 2012, but they're not going to make it."
Would a movie studio do for the private sector? Maybe if Avatar turns out to be as big a hit as its early reviews would suggest, Cameron can convince an exec to strap some booster rockets to craft services. Until then, we can always re-watch Aliens.
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