Is there anything remotely realistic about this spaceship? Space.com posed that question to several space travel experts, as well as Guy Hendrix Dyas, the film's production designer. Dyas looked at the history of movie spaceships (including the vehicles from the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" universes) in his quest to come up with something unique for the new film.

The ship's design

The Avalon has three long, thin modules that wrap around a common center and spin (sort of like stripes on a barbershop pole). Dyas said he based that design on sycamore seeds. It appears that the spin also provides the ship with artificial gravity, similar to fictional ships in the movies "Interstellar" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." The ship is powered by eight nuclear fusion reactors, Dyas said, and can run autonomously, healing most systems even with the crew asleep (as seen in the film). 

The ship's immense structure is about 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) in length, and Dyas said he imagines that it was assembled in space over decades. The film takes place at an indeterminate point in the future, Dyas said, but he assumed that by the time the ship was being built, humans would have the ability to mine some of the materials from nearby asteroids or the moon to save on transportation costs.

"My approach to the [ship] design was that I tried to go about it as though I was a cruise liner ship designer," Dyas told Space.com. "I wanted to put myself in the shoes of somebody who had been designing a craft that had a portion of it dedicated to entertainment, and of course that led to the array of colors and textual changes in the ship." 

This approach led Dyas to design the more functional areas (such as the mess hall) in stainless steel, while a classy passenger pub was decorated in rich oranges, golds and reds, for example.

Banks of hibernation pods occupy huge halls in the ship. The crew slumbers in separate quarters, inaccessible to the passengers. The pods are clustered into small groups, perhaps (Dyas suggests) so that if one group's cluster fails, at least the other 5,000 passengers are theoretically unaffected.

The hibernation procedure is not really described in the film, but what's clear to moviegoers is what happens afterward: passengers are soothed by a holographic figure explaining where they are. They are escorted to an elevator, then guided to their individual cabin, where they can relax for the last four months of the journey. 

In between resting in their quarters, passengers can also get to know the rest of the 5,000 people in common areas, such as the mess hall, the grand concourse, the pool or the bar. [Interstellar Glitz: Designing the 'Passengers' Starship, Inside and Out]

Hibernation

While "Passengers" shows people placed in a hibernation state for decades at a time, that kind of technology does not exist today. There are situations, however, where patients can be put into induced comas with cooled saline solutions for a few days to allow traumatic injuries to heal. 

In 2015, a company called SpaceWorks received a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts grant to investigate the possibility of extending the timeframe of an induced stasis in humans even further than what is currently possible. Aerospace engineer John Bradford, the company's COO, told Space.com that induced stasis should be possible given that some mammals can hibernate for months. (NIAC grants are for early-stage work in far-off technologies.)

"We're not trying to extend the human lifetime," Bradford said, so the technology that SpaceWorks is pursuing is different from what is shown in "Passengers." But in other respects, the movie shows essentially the same thing his company strives for. 

"We're trying to put people in a small container to minimize the mass and power requirements, and the consumables [during spaceflight]," he added, saying that during a long Mars journey of perhaps six months, putting astronauts into stasis would cut down on the amount of food required for the mission, not to mention the possibility of crew boredom.

And what about exercise? Bradford said it would be possible to keep up an astronaut's muscle mass using neuromuscular electric stimulation; there have been some positive results in comatose patients using that technique, he said. 

Bradford said he had been lucky enough to see "Passengers" before its release, and that he was really pleased to see an emphasis on hibernation, and what happens in the moments after waking up, when the passengers are disoriented and extremely tired (since hibernation or stasis is not the same as sleep).

"That part of the storyline is usually jumped over," he said.

Interstellar propulsion

Nuclear fusion is a possible source of propulsion for interstellar ships, but the problem is the size of the reactors that would need to be assembled in space, or launched there, according to some scientists we talked to. So other methods are being considered to get spacecraft going at interstellar speeds.

One idea under consideration by Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, uses lasers. Under another NIAC grant, he is developing a concept known as Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration, which would generate propulsion from laser photons reflected in a mirror. The long-term goal is to create a spacecraft that can, like in "Passengers," move at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Antimatter engines are another possibility for fueling interstellar ships, said Andreas Tziolas, the co-founder and president of Icarus Interstellar. Antimatter particles are naturally occurring particles that are "opposites" to regular matter particles — so the positron is the antimatter equivalent to the electron; the particles have the same mass but are different in other ways, including electric charge (the electron is negative, the positron is positive). When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate, and release energy.

"The energy [an antimatter engine] generates is very pure in that it generates a lot of photons when matter reacts with antimatter," he told Space.com. "All of the matter is annihilated and it turns into pure photonic energy. However, the photons themselves are hard to capture."

Though it's not stated directly it the film, it's possible the "Passengers" ship is being fueled by the interstellar medium — the tenuous collection of hydrogen particles that populate much of the universe. This concept was proposed in a 1960 thought experiment by American physicist Robert Bussard, who argued it would allow a ship to travel without having to haul fuel along for the ride. 

But there's a problem with that idea, according to Geoffrey Landis, a science fiction author and NASA physicist. Since 1960, scientists have discovered that the medium is too sparse to allow fusion to happen, Landis said.

"The idea was, if you don't carry your fuel with you, you might be able to avoid having a simply enormous fuel tank," he said. But with that theory debunked, the problem remains about how to get to such an incredible speed while still hauling fuel with you. [Does Humanity's Destiny Lie in Interstellar Space Travel? (Op-Ed)]

From a practical standpoint, Landis also agreed that a ship that size would likely have to be built largely in space, and that will probably require asteroid mining.

While asteroid mining is still in the future, there are a couple of companies that are getting started on prospecting. Both Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources have plans to scout out nearby asteroids to learn about their composition, and the possibilities for getting spacecraft out there. Asteroid-mining technology is in an early stage, but both companies are generating other products (such as Earth observation) that have received some support from customers.

Building a business case would take some time, but Landis said it would be very possible to create a spacecraft from extraterrestrial resources. 

"In the long term, if we're going to build these enormous habitats, we are going to have to build them from material in space," he said. "That's a very feasible idea. There's literally millions of asteroids out there from which we could harvest materials without having to drag it out of the gravity well of the Earth."

Ship design

Landis also seemed to think that the Avalon creates gravity by rotating. 

"I'm getting a little tired of artificial gravity in 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,'" he said, referring to the ability of the ships in these long-standing franchises to generate gravity by more theoretical means.

Experts interviewed for the story agreed that, in general, the ship also appears to take into account human factors, which means designing an environment so that it can best accommodate how humans operate. 

An example is how the environment is decorated. Even on the International Space Station, the sterile gray interior is populated with pictures, signs and other mementoes from past crews. Individual astronauts can decorate their quarters to their liking, so that they have family pictures to look at during their six-month missions. So the décor choices that Dyas made are important in real-world spaceflight as well.

Looking at previews for the movie, Tziolas said he thinks the Starship Avalon is similar to the concept that Icarus Interstellar has proposed for an  spaceship. Called Project Hyperion, this craft also has cruise ship-like amenities, room for 5,000 passengers and a spinning design for artificial gravity.

Tziolas added that he is so pleased that Hollywood is getting more realistic with its ship designs in general.

So could the ship from Passengers really exist? Our experts seemed to agree that there are some aspects that reflect real-world science, but some key questions remain about how such a massive vessel would make an interstellar trek. 

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The designer, Vitaly Bulgarov, told Live Science that the robot is real. However, he declined to share the names of scientists or engineers working on the project, and messages to the purported CEO of the company went unreturned. [Gallery: See Images of the Giant Humanoid Robot]

Mystery business

According to Bulgarov's Facebook page, the videos were taken in South Korea at a company called Korea Future Technology. Almost all references to this company online appear to be associated with Bulgarov's posts and the subsequent news pieces on the robot. Bulgarov said the company has been operating for several years.

The domain name of the supposed company, found on Bulgarov's file names, hankookmirae.com, meaning "South Korea Future," was registered in February to is Lim Hyun Kuk, the name of the person Bulgarov said was CEO of the company. There is no active website associated with the domain; Bulgarov said one is slated to go online next week.

"If you look at this from a Western point of view, then yeah, that might seem strange, but in that part of the world, the culture is a little different. The company wants to make something first before they advertise themselves," Bulgarov said of the inactive website. [Gallery: Disaster-Response Robots Face Off]

The person who answered the phone number associated with the domain registration said Lim worked at that address but was not available to talk. Lim did not return a message left at that number or emails sent to three addresses possibly associated with him.   

Bulgarov told Live Science in an email that the release of the videos was intended for his circle of followers only, and that the company would do a "proper press release" when the robot is completed in 2017. He said a "Professor Park" was associated with the work but would not provide a given name or affiliation for that researcher. ("Park" is the third-most-common surname in Korea.) He also declined to answer questions about funding for the project.

"Frankly, right now, we don't even really care if people think this is legit because we didn't try to promote it," Bulgarov said.

Technical difficulties

The robot itself looks like one of the military robots in the movie "Avatar." A pilot inside the torso moves his arms to control the robot's upper limbs. (This kind of design is known as a "mech.") The robot is tethered by a power cable above, but walks several steps in the video clips. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

The technology shown in the video is plausible, said Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has developed a jumping robot.

The robot looks a bit top-heavy, Fearing said, but its external power source could mean it would be light enough to function. The idea of developing robots steered by a person inside goes back to at least the 1960s, Fearing said. Several research teams are developing robotic exoskeletons to help people lift heavier loads or to allow paralyzed people to walk again. 

Bipedal robots much more graceful than the one shown in the new video are already a reality. Robotics company Boston Dynamics has Atlas, an approximately human-sized bipedal automaton that can even navigate rough ground. And Georgia Tech's DURUS robot walks with a heel-to-toe gait, just like a human.

Fearing said the technology in the video would be a "nice piece of work." He estimated that something like it might cost $20 million and take a couple of years to make.

But there are also questions about the video. Though Bulgarov wrote on his Instagram page that the ground shakes as the giant robot walks, the camera and nearby objects appear steady. The lab itself is also remarkably sleek and futuristic compared to academic labs in the United States and even industry labs like those of Boston Dynamics.

"Robots are messy business," said Christian Hubicki, a postdoctoral robotics researcher at Georgia Tech who worked on the DURUS robot. "They get torn apart and put back together over and over, and transmission grease gets all over the place. Even the nice white floor is beautifully unscuffed [in these videos]. Never once during likely hundreds of hours of debugging the giant robot did it kick in a way that scratched it up?"

The people around the robot also appear to be too close for safety and are not following the standard practice of wearing safety goggles, Hubicki said.

Bulgarov said the company's CEO required that the lab be clean, and that the videos had been brightened in postproduction. Fearing said robotics labs in Asia can be relatively neat.

However, there's another problem: Hubicki told Live Science that the robot's leg joints look unusually smooth given the force that the step of a 1.5-ton robot would exert on the motors. [5 Reasons to Fear Robots]

"When I look at the bulk of the leg — say, above the ankle — it still stops its downward motion extremely quickly (I think within a frame of the video)," Hubicki wrote in an email. "[N]ot impossible, but if it is real, I'd be really curious about how the effects of that impact are being handled."

Bulgarov said dampers in the robot's feet make its motion smooth. He also said the robot wasn't built for use as is but as a platform to show off various technical feats, like the human-machine interface for moving the arms or the bipedal locomotion. Right now, he said the robot couldn't walk on an uneven surface but might be useful for industrial purposes, though there are no plans to use the robot in its current state. The cockpit and arms could be attached to a wheeled vehicle for rough terrain, Bulgarov said. The company is considering applications such as cleanup at the Fukushima power plant, which was damaged during the 2011 tsunami in Japan, Bulgarov said. 

Some companies do make demonstration robots without many practical applications, Fearing and Hubicki said. However, building a 1.5-ton robot for this purpose would be a quite extreme, Hubicki added.

"To me, building a giant, walking mech to showcase your arm technology is a bit like building a rocket ship to demonstrate your cockpit technology," he said. 

When asked directly if the robot was real, Bulgarov said, "It is real, and more footage is coming."

Fearing wondered if perhaps the company was intentionally obscuring its origins and goals to create more interest. There have also been situations where companies have exaggerated reality, he said.

"I don't know of this group, but unfortunately, I know other groups have mixed CAD [computer-aided design] images and reality to raise money and [have] not disclosed the mixture," Fearing said.

Hubicki urged skepticism. "As intriguing as the video is," he said, "at some point, you have to ask yourself, 'Did a secret company with no obvious ties to existing humanoid robotics groups actually develop a giant humanoid robot with likely unparalleled power and torque, and instead of sending out a press release, they unveil the robot by dribbling out low-resolution videos on Instagram via an affiliate who just so happens to be a visual effects artist?'"

Original article on Live Science.