How The Big Bang Theory Sent Howard Wolowitz To Space

Now that we know about all the technical specs, what did the creative team of “The Big Bang Theory” — and Simon Helberg himself — think of the recreated International Space Station? Unsurprisingly, they loved it. In Jessica Radloff’s 2022 oral history “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” creator and mega-showrunner Chuck LorreLorre’s co-creator Bill Prady, Helberg, and director Mark Cendrowski discussed the making of Howard’s space episodes, sharing their own unique challenges.

As Prady put it, Lorre was all-in on the space idea, and luckily, Prady had only just recently met a high-ranking administrator at NASA named Lori Garver, who got Mike Massimino involved. (The crew also liked Massimino so much that, obviously, they wrote a part for him.) Ultimately, Prady just wanted it to look good: “My feeling was that if you were a scientist or astronaut, the standard I wanted is that they shouldn’t throw their shoes at the TV. I think we got here because people were very happy about it.” (As Lorre then pointed out, “By the time we were doing those stories, the show was successful enough to where we had the time and money to build sets and take our time and get it right.”)

Cendrowski, for his part, had to figure out how to film the “zero gravity” and make it look real: “I asked to put the cameras on a gyroscope so they floated and you had a constant feel of motion.” After figuring out they had to flip some images, it all came out smoothly. “It was a great puzzle to figure out, and once we did, it looked great,” Cendrowski said. “People thought we used the plane from ‘Apollo 13’ to film it. We were like, ‘Oh, we fooled ’em.'”

“The show worked to always be 100 percent authentic and accurate, and the space storyline was a very important piece to that,” Helberg added. “The only CGI stuff they really did was with a pen that floats away, but everything else was just practical effects.” The scenes came out very well, and you can watch them on Max now, where the entire series is streaming.