Space cadets fooled into thinking they went into space.

The contestants believed they were Britain's first 'space tourists'

Three contestants have spoken of their disbelief after being fooled into thinking they went into space for the UK reality show Space Cadets. The three believed they had blasted off from a cosmonaut training camp in Russia, but were in fact in a fake spaceship in a warehouse in Suffolk. They cheered up when told they had each won £25,000 ($44,300).

But one contestant, teaching assistant Keri Hasset from Birmingham, said she was "heartbroken" by the prank.

"When I thought we were coming back to Earth I was planning my speech. I was going to say it had been my childhood dream. Now I'm a little bit heartbroken," she said.

Ms Hasset, plasterer Paul French, 26 from Bristol, and footballer/recruitment consultant Billy Jackson, 25, from Kent, had suspicions they were being tricked when they had to hold a ceremony for a celebrity Russian dog called Mr Bimby on the spaceship.

"This is a spacecraft but it feels like a caravan," Paul told his fellow astronauts.

"And if we were going to space and they were weighing us for our health, they wouldn't use scales like you get at home, would they?"

On discovering the show was a fake, Billy told Channel 4: "My mum and dad are gonna love this.

"This is the biggest wind-up ever. This is wicked."

"Aw man," said Paul. "We're not astronauts. We're just asses."

The show, presented by Johnny Vaughan, built a full-scale replica of a Russian space training camp in a disused hangar near Ipswich.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4537748.stm

How FUCKING STUPID can a person be to think they were launched into space when they really weren't?

On the other hand...

Is it still cruel to be cruel to stupid people? I think so.

Unless they're DU trolls, of course.

did they do training like the astronauts do? Or just show up, do weighing and get on? :shrug:

Ridiculous, nonsense training.

Really, really stupid. When they explained to the cadets why they wouldn't experience weightlessness ("If you understand gravity, you can control it.") they just wrote it down in their notebooks like good little monkeys. It wasn't until much later that they started getting wise to the prank.

(and I think the programme managed to avoid using the word 'gullible' all the way through!) They also screened out anyone who showed signs of knowing any science, or having any interest in science fiction. Finally, they asked them to name a family member or close friend who they trusted absolutely - the programme makers then revealed all to that person, and asked them if they thought the contestant would take it OK.

I did wonder if the contestants were all actors - but if they were, the script writers weren't very good, because the contestants' behaviour was fairly boring on the whole. It's fairly amazing they simply accepted the explanation that they were going to use 'artifical gravity generators' so they wouldn't be weightless - you'd think they would have asked why such an amazing leap in technology wasn't widely heard of, and why they'd go to all that bother to get rid of one of the major features of going into orbit.

I tried to watch it a couple of times and it bored me to tears. The big "live launch" was particularly rubbish. (And this is coming from somebody who still watches "I'm a Celebrity ..." & "Big Brother" every year.)