Does Fast & Furious 9 go into space?

Still, it was supposed to be a joke – no-one actually thought they'd follow through.

In latest outing Fast & Furious 9 though – out now in cinemas – they finally, really did it. Tasked with disrupting a signal that will reset all digital devices on Earth and so cause global mayhem, Tej (Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) learn that the satellite at the heart of Project Aries cannot be disabled remotely and that they must travel into outer space in order to shut it down manually.

That would be wild enough, but of course, this being Fast & Furious, they don't just hitch a ride on a space shuttle – no, the terrified twosome used a rocket car provided by Sean Boswell (Lucas Black), Twinkie (Bow Wow) and Earl Hu (Jason Tobin) to enter orbit. (Somehow, the fact that Sean has transitioned from The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift's high school drop-out to a rocket scientist and aircraft pilot is the least ludicrous thing about this whole affair.)

Read more: How is Han alive in Fast & Furious 9?

Speaking to Vulture, F9's executive producer Josh Henson revealed that the trip into space was initially pitched as "a joke" only for the film's director Justin Lin to actually take a liking to the idea. "Kind of as a joke, we put together a pitch that looks like, 'Okay, Dom and the gang go to the moon, and they race cars; they’re racing cool rovers on the moon and Dom wrecks his rover. And the bad guy’s about to get away, but he’s just at the Apollo 11 site. And he finds the original moon rover, and he’s racing.'

"We kind of did it as a joke, and we pitched it to Justin, and we had a good laugh. But then Justin’s like, 'Well, maybe there’s something there.'"

Lin took the joke concept seriously, apparently even contacting NASA scientist to ensure that the science behind Tej and Roman's Pontiac Fiero taking a trip into space was solid(-ish). "I’m picking their brains about how to do it,” he explained. "That Fiero, if you look at it, has been reinforced. It has been built out. And actually, they’ve been testing it. Earl, Twinkie, and Sean are not making this up. They work at a propulsion lab. They are rocket scientists!"

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So there you have it – yes, Fast & Furious goes into space now and, yes, it does make a sort of sense. Sort of. As much sense as Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his rag-tag family of street racers transforming into intelligence operatives with peak kung-fu skills and weapons training anyway.

The question now is... with Fast & Furious 10 and another film left to go before the core Fast franchise wraps up, where can the series possibly go next? Our money's on time travel. Get Dom behind the wheel of a DeLorean, you cowards.

Read more: How the Fast & Furious series became Hollywood’s most important franchise

Fast & Furious 9 is out now in cinemas – find out how to rewatch all the Fast & Furious movies in order and what happens in the Fast & Furious 9 post-credits scene, and read our Fast & Furious 9 review.

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