UPDATE: Nasa has posted their own blog post about the video, including all of the different technologies used.
It’s a slow news Friday, but if you’re on Twitter, all “the kids” are taking about the new music video from boy band One Direction. 99.99% of the time, we wouldn’t care, but in this new video, the band is playing with awesome NASA tech and being shot into space.
Now, what are the odds that happens on a slow news day? Pretty slim. But if you didn’t hate One Direction before, you will after this video. These little brats get to roam free at NASA, put on Armageddon-looking space suits, drive rovers and play with robots? Even if this stuff is 100% staged, it makes me so mad. (Or maybe it’s jealousy. Probably both.)
To make matters worse, the space angle has almost nothing at all to do with their song, which is called “Drag Me Down” and is about a woman whose love buoys them up. They probably were just like, “Let’s go to NASA so we can play with cool shit” and it happened. (To be fair, very few music videos these days have anything to do with the songs.)
Or maybe, the group just decided to throw up a big middle finger to their former member Zayn Malik, who left the group in March, by filming in this super setting. This is, after all, their first video without him. (Wait, why do I know this? Someone slap me!)
You can’t blame NASA here, either. This single video will probably alert more teens to their existence than anything since the Moon landing. There’s no downside for them. Plus, there’s some really great, real-life stuff in the video. For example, they’re exercising using Stephen Colbert’s treadmill, romping with NASA’s vast fleet of planes and the robot Harry Styles is playing with is JAXA’s Robonaut, who is bragging about it on Twitter:
Plus, the ship they’re in at the end looks just like the Orion so apparently they’re blasting off on the first human deep space mission. And that’s all well and good, but it does really make you hate One Direction that much more.
Contact the author at germain@io9.com.