Many of you may have seen the trailer for the upcoming space thriller Gravity. It’s due to hit theaters on October 4th, staring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. If you haven’t seen the preview take a look.
While the movie certainly looks to be a heart-racing thriller with amazing visual effects, some people have already pointed out major flaws in the plot that tear down the movie’s credibility. The main dis-creditor is astronaut Dr. Michael J. Massimino, who has himself gone on similar missions to the one in the film. He went to see the movie with writer Dennis Overbye of the New York Times. (If you do not want to have details of the plot ruined, stop reading here.) An accident in space leaves Clooney and Bullock stranded out in space after doing repair work on the Hubble Telescope. Clooney decides their only chance of survival is to use the jetpack on his back to travel to the ISS. This is where the plot begins to detach from the realm of possibility. Overbye puts it brilliantly:
As we recall from bitter memory, the Hubble and the space station are in vastly different orbits. Getting from one to the other requires so much energy that not even space shuttles had enough fuel to do it. The telescope is 353 miles high, in an orbit that keeps it near the Equator; the space station is about 100 miles lower, in an orbit that takes it far north, over Russia.To have the movie astronauts Matt Kowalski (Mr. Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Ms. Bullock) zip over to the space station would be like having a pirate tossed overboard in the Caribbean swim to London.
If you didn’t want to read that whole quotation, basically what Overbye, along with input from Massimino, is stating is that it would be impossible for the Bullock and Clooney to travel the immense distance between the orbit of the Hubble to the orbit of the ISS. Also according to Overbye, this would not be such a huge problem if the directors had not put as much work into realistically depicting physics and all the technology and gadgets in the film. One thing we all need to keep in mind is that this is a Holloywood movie we are talking about and not a documentary or educational video about space, so exaggerations are expected. I am still certainly excited to see Gravity when it comes out this Friday.
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