What Is The Best Movie Set In Space? We Asked Real-Life Astronauts To Find Out

Opening shot: distant stars are visible against an ink black background. In the foreground, something bright: a planet, a spacecraft, both. Cue the music, epic crescendo, unsettling tones, the action is about to begin. The title appears, you know it is already the best space movie ever made. What name popped into your head?

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Maybe it’s because it's one of the earliest science fiction movies that captured my imagination early on, but I’d say 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Samantha Cristoforetti

IFLScience was recently reporting from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Ministerial Council for 2025, where ESA got the funding for a lot of interesting projects, from a mission to look for life on Enceladus to the plan to fly after a dangerous asteroid. While there, we spoke with several astronauts about human space exploration and the exciting plan to build a space station around the Moon, but as we're also about the lighter side of science, we also asked them what they thought the best movie set in space is.

“Maybe it’s because it's one of the earliest science fiction movies that captured my imagination early on, but I’d say 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti declared. The 1968 Stanley Kubrick masterpiece, based on stories and co-written by Arthur C. Clark, is considered among the best movies ever.

From the new Hopper class of astronauts, both Pablo Álvarez Fernádez, from Spain, and Raphaël Liégeois, from Belgium, went for Apollo 13, the 1995 Ron Howard movie starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell. We can easily understand the impact that seeing such a movie would have had on the younger class of astronauts, both for its depiction of a true story and for the commitment by Howard and team to create a truly realistic view of space.

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German astronaut Alexander Gerts picked The Martian, as he liked “science fiction not too far off in the future,” where he can picture himself. Based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, the Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon is also praised for its great realism. 

British fellow Hopper astronaut Rosemary Coogan might have cheated a little bit by claiming her choice is not out yet. Her favorite sci-fi novel is Project Hail Mary, also by Andy Weir, so she’s betting on the upcoming movie adaptation starring Ryan Gosling and Sandra Hüller, in cinemas next March.

So are these truly the best movies set in space? A sample size of five is small, and two of the five said Apollo 13… Sure, astronauts have certain insights into space that we do not have, but they might also be biased towards heroic astronaut movies!

We decided to ask the IFLScience audience for their favorites, too, and beyond the wise guys pointing out that technically every movie is set in space because Earth is in space, we received over 100 suggestions, although some were less serious than others. 

From The Empire Strikes Back to about half of the Star Trek filmography, from arthouse films like Solaris to global successes like Wall-E, there were a lot of entries, a lot of feelings, and a lot of opinions (whether or not Contact counted sparked an entire debate about how much a movie constituted "set in space" and possible demands for more specifics in future). But there could only be one winner from our poll. 

Out of almost 10,000 votes cast, in second place, with 781 votes at time of writing, was Interstellar. But the winner, with 932 votes, is James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens. Ripley stays winning, as she should.