An asteroid then? A "rogue moon" is just not scientifically probable. Then again, they COULD easily get away with it with today's audiences.
Why not even pit landing gear on the moon and have it land on planets too?
When was a rogue space station done before? I would be interested in watching something centered around that.
YES! A base on an asteroid would work but to be truly lost in space it would have to involve some form of phenomenon like wormholes in some semi-controllable manner. Even an asteroid pitched out of the solar system at light speed would take 4 years to reach our closest stellar neighbor and that would bore the hell out of anyone.
By the way, scientists are discovering that rogue planets are much more common than originally thought:
http://www.space.com/11699-rogue-alien-planets-milky-common.html
Anyhow, I figured a nice sci-fi premise would go something like this:
Moonbase Alpha - an internationally supported research facility dedicated to deep space exploration and development of technologies to achieve that goal. One of the technologies being researched is a means of creating wormholes based on a crashed alien vessel found on the dark side of the moon. During a trial run of the wormhole tech, the experiment goes out of control and opens a giant wormhole that envelops the moon and pulls it out of orbit and spits it out somewhere in an uncharted part of space, adrift.
This wormhole tech would be used throughout the series to achieve similar jumps, allowing the moon (or asteroid) to jump to different cosmic regions, encountering new alien worlds or cosmic phenomena, which is a far cry better than the moon constantly hitting mysterious space warps and flying at several times the speed of light.
The rogue space station premise I've read in sci-fi books. On TV, the premise was more of a lost ark-type vessel. There was an old sci-fi series in the early 80s called "The Ark" or "Ark", can't recall the exact title. Hulu just debuted a sci-fi series called "Ark", also involving a drifting ark, which actually looks pretty good but I've yet to find a moment to start watching it.
--- merged: Aug 13, 2013 at 1:32 PM ---
I suppose it's pointless to argue about the technical physics of the new show's premise as we all know the focus will be on interpersonal melodrama. The moon ripped out of Earth's orbit? That pales in comparison to lunar scientists Zak and Tasha's troubled relationship in the hydroponics lab. And what about the ambitious, albeit evil and scheming physicist who is the cause of the disaster that lead to them being shot into space? Contrast this with his rock-music-listening nemesis, the bleach blonde cheerleader-cum-Einstein physicist with the copious sweater meat that manages to save the day with bouts of inspiration that only an 18yo could possibly come up with in every episode. And don't forget about the base's late middle-aged commander, who is in love with his second in command, his ex wife whom he has kids with back on Earth. Can they find peace and come together even though his much younger gf is also on the base? And what about the brash young pilot that is an A-hole on the surface but really has a heart of gold, a heart that has feelings for the commander's gf? Oh it's all so intriguing!
Go on. You've got my attention.
. But they can easily do it with a space station, one that drifts off course in a very big way, say that a solar flare pushes it via cosmic wind into deep space and accelerates it? Something like that. But you cant just have a moon traveling through space encountering new worlds and solar systems without running into some very hard gravitational science problems.
