Ron Howard Spaces Out

Forget that Brat Camp. Ron Howard wants to send reality TV to Space Camp.

After helming Apollo 13 and the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning director is one of the masterminds behind X Quest, a new Fox reality series re-creating the orbital environment.

According to Daily Variety, the show will chronicle two teams of regular folks as they go through what's essentially Space Camp--training on sophisticated multimillion-dollar hardware used by NASA to school its astronauts and simulate what it feels like to be on a spacecraft.

Howard and his partner, Brian Grazer, will produce the project through their Imagine TV banner and will be aided by coproducer and Halo creator Alex Seropian and his Spectrum MediaWorks, which will provide X Quest with the high-tech computer-generated know-how to simulate the space environment. Fox reality honcho Mike Darnell will serve as executive producer.

"From a visual standpoint, this show will seem like a $150 million movie," Imagine TV president David Nevins tells Variety.

Hoping to boldly go where no reality series has gone before, producers say the would-be space travelers will never see camera crews in their controlled environment so as not to shatter the illusion that they're living in a bedroom-sized capsule.

As Darnell expains: "They'll live, breathe, eat and sleep inside these biocrafts for about 30 days. And it's going to look to them and to the viewers like they're in space. At no time will we break through the fourth wall."

The participants will be put through extreme weather conditions like those experienced by the Apollo 13 astronauts--everything from acute heat and cold to claustrophobic situations to test contestants' mental and physical mettle and stress levels. Doctors and psychologists will be on hand to monitor the player's progress throughout.

And, in the vein of Survivor and The Apprentice, X Quest will also be an elimination-style competition.

Incorporating state-of-the-art graphics, producers will give players missions that will enable them "to get off the ships," said Nevins, and encounter advanced simulated environments such as planets, comets and asteroids. Both teams will also be assigned "specific tasks they'll have to accomplish" that will aid them in solving a larger mystery at the heart of the game.

The show will be as authentic as possible, basing its look and action on actual technology and scientific tenets--so don't expect to see E.T.s beaming in. However, due to the laws of physics, X Quest will not be set in zero gravity.

The principles have been developing the concept for months and envision X Quest as an enterprise that will appeal to videogamers, sci-fi fans and general reality-TV junkies.

Spectrum Mediaworks will also develop a videogame tie-in for X Quest.

Producers declined to reveal all the details of the show--such as what the grand prize is or whether eliminated players will be blown out the airlock.

This is reality TV's latest flirtation with the stars (and we're not talking the dancing variety). In 2000, �ber-producer Mark Burnett hatched Destination: Mir, an unscripted series with NBC that aimed to follow contestants through astronaut training, with the winner getting a rocket ride to Russia's Mir space station. But those lofty ambitions were scuttled along with Mir, which fell back down to Earth and burned up in the atmosphere four years ago.

Howard, meantime, is in the midst of shooting his big-budget adaptation of The Da Vinci Code with Tom Hanks. His most recent film, the critically praised Cinderella Man, struggled at the box office but is considered a contender come Oscar season.

As for X Quest, it's being prepped for a launch in summer 2006.