The series stars Miya Cech, Bryce Gheisar, Keith L. Williams, Kayden Grace Swan, and Ben Daon, as well as features the voice of Paige Howard.
The children have to find their way back to Earth while doing a space mission and attempting to keep the spaceship from breaking down.
On June 18, 2019, it was announced that Imagine Kids & Family was developing an untitled scripted space series for Nickelodeon.
[2][3] On February 19, 2020, an action-adventure single-camera television series under the working title of The Astronauts was ordered by Nickelodeon for 10 episodes, with an initial premiere set for summer 2020.
Starring in the series were Miya Cech as Samantha "Samy" Sawyer-Wei, Bryce Gheisar as Elliott Combs, Keith L. Williams as Martin Taylor, Kayden Grace Swan as Doria Taylor, Ben Daon as Will Rivers, and Paige Howard as the voice of Matilda.
Martin and Doria were asked to bring their dad, Niles, his spare key, which gives Elliott the idea to sneak into the launch pad for a little look.
The ship blasted off with the five kids, Martin and Doria Taylor, William "Will" Rivers, Elliott Combes, and Samantha "Samy" Sawyer-Wei, inside.
The episode starts with Will and Elliott playing a game called "dookie derbie", where they race whose poop comes out the ship first.
With Elliott unable to "do his business", he decided to flush Squeebe McSqueeberton, which then got stuck in the piping system.
While the standard protocol dictates that a crew member needs to check the exterior fuselage, the parents back in mission control says to just seal off the outrigger and decrease their oxygen consumption.
The biometrics shows that oxygen consumption has in fact increase and Samy realizes that there's no other way than to fix the breach from the outside.
Elliott realizes this and seeks help from the instructional videos on board the Odyssey II, it tells that crew morale can and may very well be the hardest problem to fix and if left unchecked could be the most lethal of all the onboard issues.
While having breakfast the morning briefing starts and Lind, the flight director says "cheerio" which seems to be a code for Samy who then goes straight to her own quarters with Singer waiting for her.
Their window was a 1 hour and 11 minutes at 02:00 AM where Matilda goes into debug mode where she is cut off from the Odyssey II shipboard functions.
The plan was to deactivate Matilda and let the original crew pilot the Odyssey II from ground control.
At some point Samy had had enough and stormed back to her cabin, Doria went to comfort her and tells her that sometimes it's best to let others feel needed and important.
The kids ate and realized their rude behaviour towards each other, and Will apologizes for being the worst backseat driver explaining that "when you already watched a movie a million time, you can't help but yell at them".
While in orbit, they caught a glimpse of Kamohoali'i and decided to take a picture, which then turned out to not look anything like an asteroid and more like an alien craft.
With the Odyssey II entering the escape window, they are ready to thrust away from Venus and back to Earth, but at the last minute Samy didn't turn on the thrusters and suddenly said "guys, we need to talk."