“How does your family feel about you leaving them for three years?”

Hilary Swank’s character is asked this question by a reporter in one of the first scenes in the new 10-episode space-exploration dramatic series “Away,” premiering on Netflix on Friday, Sept. 4. She’s just been introduced at a news conference as American astronaut Emma Green, the commander of Atlas I, the firsthuman mission to Mars.

Emma’s husband, Matt (played by Josh Charles of “The Good Wife”), a fellow astronaut sidelined for health reasons, and 15-year-old daughter, Lex (newcomer Talita Bateman), are seated in the auditorium, beaming with what looks like equal parts pride and fear.

“Away” is far from the first television show or movie to dramatize a woman’s attempt to balance the pulls of motherhood and professional ambition. But it’s certainly cranked up the emotional stakes, befitting a project whose producers include Jason Katims (“Friday Night Lights”) and Ed Zwick (“Thirtysomething,” “Glory”), whoalso directed the first episode.

Just seconds before Emma’s big NASA announcement, she’s in full soccer-mom mode, cheering on Lex’s game from the sidelines. When she blasts off with an international crew (played by actors Ato Essandoh, Mark Ivanir, Ray Panthaki and Vivian Wu), it’s a given that she’ll return — if they beat the 50/50 odds of dying in space — after Lex is done with high school. Emma may be a planetary pioneer, but back on Earth she’ll miss milestones like her daughter getting her driver’s license and falling in love for the first time.

Swank tells The Chronicle what she loves most about the show’s story基于2014年克里斯·琼斯的《时尚先生》article about Scott Kelly’s preparations to spend a year aboard the International Space Station, is that her character’s dedication toher family and her job are taken for granted equally from that first set-up.

“A woman being willing to sacrifice for her purpose” is worth celebrating, Swank says by phone from her home in Los Angeles.

The two-time Oscar winner (2000’s “Boys Don’t Cry” and 2005’s “Million Dollar Baby”) can relate to the personal toll on actors and their loved ones when they leave home for months-long shoots. Swank, 46,also knows from personal experience how it feels to choose between work and family. She took a break from acting in 2014 that wound up lasting three years to help her dad through a lung transplant and be his health advocate. The surgery was a success, andhe’s still healthy, she says.

“For me, to make the choice to step away from your career was a no-brainer,” Swank says. “I wasn’t preparing a mission to Mars, but I think we all understand what it means to make a sacrifice, which could be for your job, or it could be for your purpose as a parent, a child or a partner. People can relate to making that choice.”

Swank has tiptoed back into acting, determined to only takelarger roles she is passionate about. She played Gail Getty on the 2018 FX series “The Trust” and appeared in the Blumhouse thriller “The Hunt” this year. She also stars in the crime thriller “Fatale,” scheduled to be released in October.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it, that (in “Away”) I’m playing a woman commander on a mission to Mars, and that’s not the drama of the show,” Swank says. “I’m married to a fellow astronaut who can’t go and that, again, is not the drama of the show. We are equals, walking shoulder to shoulder, supporting one another. He’s not emasculated by me being a leader who sees vulnerability as a strength and not a weakness. How rare and beautiful is that?”

Showrunner Jessica Goldberg (“Parenthood”) saysshe “had never seen the story of a working mom told with such complexity and honesty” as in playwright Andrew Hinderaker’s initial script for “Away.”

Current and former U.S. astronauts helped ensure that the show’s portrayal of a lengthy space mission, involving endless problem-solving and MacGyvering the spacecraft, was as accurate as possible. But for the show’s portrayal of a marriage of equals, Goldberg and the “Away” writing staff drew inspiration from the partnerships of Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her late husband, Martin.

“Those were two couples that we kept coming back around to,” says Goldberg, to craft a portrait of “relationships where people support and are invested in each other, not only in their family but in the pursuit of larger life goals.

“It’ll be interesting to see how people respond to Hilary’s character, because, even with all the progress we’ve made, mothers aren’t expected to do these things. But people don’t realize that the (American) who has spent the most time in space is a woman, astronaut Peggy Whitson.”

Whitson, who retired in 2018 after accumulating665 days in orbit, happens to be from the same small Iowa town as Swank’s mother. “It’s so crazy what a small world it is,” Swank says. “When I drive to my mom’s old farm, you pass the sign that says, ‘This was the home of Peggy,’ right at the fork in the road.

”她和我分享w much of being a leader in space is working with people’s egos, reading others. She said you have to be a kind of a psychologist in a way, always talking things through.”

Another retired U.S. astronaut, Karen Nyberg, told Swank “that 100% of the women training for missions get asked, ‘How will having kids interfere with going to space?’ But none of the men were asked that question, even though most of the men had more children than the women. So, the double standard is quite glaring.”

Swank and the four other actors playing the Atlas crew attended a five-day “space boot camp” in preparation for the athletic “Away” shoot, which required them to be suspended from wires to mimic weightlessness, sometimes up to two hours a day.

“You have to make it look effortless, like you’re really in zero-G, when you’re actually working really hard, squeezing your glutes to go forward and squeezing your abs when you want to go back, but you can’t make it look or sound like you’re exerting anything,” Swank says. “You have to make it seem like you’re really floating.”

Swank apologizes for briefly interrupting the interview to let in her dog. “Can you believe my dog’s name is Moon?” she says.

“I wanted to be an astronaut before being an actor. Just the idea of it still feels the same to me now as it did in my young mind,” she says. “It’s the idea of something bigger than all of us, of something so expansive and unknown, and looking down at how little we really all are in the overall scheme of things. I couldn’t word it like that as a kid, but I have the same feeling of awe now.”

“Away”debuts Friday, Sept. 4, on Netflix.