On Friday my class saw the movie, “Gravity”.  The movie is set in current day space; it opens with astronauts (George Clooney, Sandra Bullock) attempting to install a new instrument on the Hubble space telescope.  All is well until debris from a Russian nuclear test rips through satellites causing a huge cloud of scrap metal to speed towards the telescope and the exposed astronauts.  The third astronaut is killed immediately leaving Clooney and Bullock on their own to fend for themselves as the debris continues to orbit and pummel them.  Using Clooney’s EVA jet pack they make their way to the ISS, in hopes of using one of the re-entry vehicles.  As they arrive the debris hits them again, Clooney is pulled away and drifts to his death, Bullock enters the station and uses the damaged vehicle to travel to the Chinese station.  Once she arrives she enters another, operational re-entry vehicle and tumbles to earth, safely landing in a lake.

The movie, while fun to watch, is riddled with scientific inaccuracies.  To start with, there is only one stable orbital speed per radius, and in the movie the debris is orbiting in the same direction as the stations, making impacts impossible. Another is that George Clooney’s death defies Newton’s laws.  There is no force pulling him, and yet even after coming to rest he is still ripped from the para-cord he is clinging to upon his and Bullock’s arrival to the ISS.

Despite these and many other mistakes, “Gravity” is still a fun movie to watch.  Just remember to take the science with a grain on salt.