This week, Cuatro has begun the countdown to send Jesús Calleja into space. The star adventurer of the channel has managed, we don't know how, to get a ticket for the next trip on the New Shepard rocket. It will be the tenth trip of the company Blue Origin, which sends capsules beyond the Kármán Line with the suborbital rocket for vertical launch and landing. The purpose of these expeditions is eminently touristic. On this trip, which will be broadcast live on February 25, there will be another five passengers. Calleja presents himself as the third Spaniard to go into space after Pedro Duque and Miguel López Alegría.
Cuatro, for the moment, has begun to sell the exciting expedition in the form of a series, Calleja in space, which will also be offered through Amazon Prime, where the first two episodes are now. The choice of the platform is obvious because the space adventure and the great digital supermarket share an owner: Jeff Bezos.
For now, in the television field, the preliminaries are dedicated to promoting Calleja's enthusiasm by incorporating his family and showing that traveling to space has been his dream since childhood. The adventurer's mother plays the role of the sufferer and the brother plays the role of a patient observer and remembers the games they played as children imagining that they were astronauts. Calleja, with his usual narcissism, expert in the story of the "I", builds an egocentric, hyperventilated narrative of overflowing enthusiasm. His lack of worries, reservations and scruples is inversely proportional to his recklessness. The presenter fully trusts in the security of the project and provides it with the doses of protagonism that it needs.
For now, the first two episodes are supposedly informative about the characteristics of space travel, the scientific and technological aspects that are taken into account and the development of these missions. Calleja also interviews experts in space disciplines and other passengers who have participated in this type of flight, asks for advice and tries to anticipate some of the difficulties that the trip entails.
Cuatro tiptoes around, as if they were something unnecessary or inconsequential, the true characteristics of this type of extreme tourism for millionaires. The sustainability of these adventures in space that last less than fifteen minutes, and the business interests and values behind the magnate Jeff Bezos. At the moment it has not been clarified how they have managed to find a place in this adventure that only people with enormous purchasing power can afford. The big mystery is, who pays for all this? It will be interesting to see the compensation that this mission has for the presenter and for Mediaset. On the other hand, if the finale ended with a catastrophic result, Telecinco could always take advantage of a great drama.
