It’s been forty years since I began working on real spacecraft propulsion systems and forty years that Hollywood has been twisting physics to suit space-faring fantasies. Guess which one continues to bother me.
Allow me to paint you a picture. I’m sitting in a movie theatre watching Hollywood take physics and toss it out the window. Along comes some hapless astronaut floating gracefully toward a blood red murderously alien mega moon when suddenly…
BOOM!
There go his tethered supplies and now Houston (and our hero) are watching him fly away at accelerating speeds towards an apparently certain death.
“No!” I yell, jumping out of my seat and interrupting the entire row behind me. “That doesn’t work that way!” My neighbour, Bob looks at me, clearly irritated by my antics. “But that’s nothing!” I continue. His velocity does not change when he lets go of the tether. He was moving at the exact same speed as that bag of tools before he released it, and it’s still moving at that exact speed, except now there’s two objects going in the same direction instead of one.”
Bob sighs, “Did you know you can leave early?” He asks me as the wife grabs my arm and gives it a bloody twist. Poor Bob. He was an engineer too.
Seriously though, Space is hard!
Spaceships shouldn’t bank and turn like fighter jets. Physics does not behave the same in space as it does within a planetary atmosphere.
Jumping between asteroids like they’re boulders in a park pond is not impressive. Propulsion in space is exhausting work.
I love space opera as much as the next nerd. I cut my teeth on sci-fi novels as a kid watching NASA put men on the moon and dreaming of the day we’d have our own shining starships sailing through the heavens. But there’s a line between sci-fi and space idiocy that Hollywood has crossed long ago.
Movies like Gravity make me cringe. Visually it was beautiful, and Sandra Bullock was delightful floating around in that canister. But everything about the orbital mechanics was ludicrous. Newton’s basics were thrown out the window to allow for George Clooney to make a sacrificial moment that would tug on heartstrings.
“But WHY did you have to ruin such a great movie, Chris?” I hear you cry. Well let’s examine it shall we? You want him to drift away? Fine. Give him a slight roll that his emergency jets cannot correct. Low on fuel. Out of luck. See? Easy fix. And that death roll he did as he was floating away? It didn’t HAVE to be part of the story.
Then there’s the damnable problem of SPACE NOT ALLOWING FOR SOUND! Every space opera movie has asteroids colliding with asteroids exploding into deadly space shrapnel with a big ol’ boom! And ships zooming past each other with wonderfulwhooshingspacesounds! And I’m sitting there going, “QUIET!!!! YOU’RE IN SPACE!!!! IT’D BE COMPLETELY Silent!”
Why does everyone forget that about space? It’s creepy how quiet it is in reality. Every satellite I worked on spent roughly fifteen minutes deploying into position with zero human interaction. Just silence while computers do their thing.
Then, of course, there’s Star Wars. Listen, I get it, space fantasy. Frackin’ lantern jawed barbarians flying crazy ships that can dodge blaster fire like it’s projectile salsa dancing. I’m good. But even fantasy needs SOME internal scientific logic.
Hyperdrive that can transport your ship across the galaxy in the blink of an eye? Don’t talk to me about G force overcome until your body jellofies. You go from zero velocity to faster than light speed instantly people! In the real world, your ship would crush you before your hyperdrive kicked in.
Likewise, every TV show and movie has artificial gravity. It’s apparently far too expensive to film actors floating around all day and audiences get bored seeing things float around so lazily. “Let’s just invent some hand-waved futuristic technology and call it a day!” Away we go…
…but why do they never explain artificial gravity? Artificial gravity is incredibly difficult to create and isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Especially in the fantastical worlds that sci-fi movies love to create. You need spin creating a whole host of other issues astronauts on the ISS avoid like the plague. Or some hand-waved future tech.
Which reminds me of my trip to ISS mission control. I got to speak with one of the flight directors there and asked him about dealing with items floating around. “Oh, that’s actually something we spend a lot of time training for,” he chuckled. “Everytime you eat, clip your food packet closed. Every tool you use, clip it back up when you’re done. Every pen has to be tethered or it’s gone forever into who knows what.”
Floating around without care is NOT how you’d move through space. The physics of moving a spacecraft in zero-G is fascinating and constantly being researched and improved upon. There’s a reason NASA spends years de-training astronauts back to earth physics.
Movie space dog fights make me giggle. Oh you think those are fun? You should see real orbital combat.
You can’t barrel roll in space. You can’t pull up-climbs. Stars Wars space is kind of like flying in the ocean. It’s got up and down directions people! Actual space combat would probably involve moving your ships like chess pieces, calculating exact trajectories using your thrusters to out maneuver your opponent.
Who knows…those battles might actually be more interesting than watching X-Wings make dog fighting noises as they barrel roll through space. Actual space combat would be terrifyingly beautiful IMO. The math needed to plot efficient attack trajectories vs maintaining your own defensive position vs running out of fuel would be…mind blowing.
See? Space is awesome, and there are stories to tell in space without tossing out the laws of physics.
Yes, 2001: A Space Odyssey is VERY slow. It’s quiet. There’s a lot of waiting for stuff to happen. Even the lunar landing sequence was more about watching computers than it was Buzz Aldrin taking giant leaps.
They avoid it because it’s not exciting. Real space combat takes months of planning to execute maneuvers that last hours. Budgets won’t allow for that.
Maybe that’s why Interstellar frustrated me so much. Chris Nolan enlisted the expertise of Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicist, to make the science as accurate as possible. Hell, the visualization of the black hole was amazing.
But then they had to tack on some horribleness about how love can traverse dimensions or whatever nonsense they came up with. The whole deal with time dilation as you approach the black hole was spot on theoretically, but felt so beaten over our heads with a giant Sciency stick.
And that stupid tesseract sciencey magic sequence was complete BS. They should have just kept it simple and focused on the physics they got right.
Thankfully people like Andy Weir actually study the orbital mechanics before chucking their protagonist out into space to see what happens. The Martian got a lot right. However, that storm that strands our intrepid astronaut was too much. That kind of storm can’t happen on Mars. The atmosphere’s too thin to have that kind of sustained intensity.
When Andy Weir spoke at a space conference years back he even admitted as much. “But I needed something to realistically strand him out there that didn’t make the crew look terrible.” Fair enough. But that’s kind of a fundamental problem with space in cinema.
Movies need action. Spectacle. Pageantry. Science doesn’t give the audience that. At least not right away.
The problem is telling a good story vs what science actually allows you to do.
Most filmmakers aren’t evil scientists trying to confuse you into learning stupidNASA terminology. They’re storytellers working within the confines of budgets, casts, and tight schedules.
Space is boring when you talk about the real physics of it. Space is dangerous because of mundane things like micrometeorite showers or coolant systems failing.
Space is mostly periods of waiting followed by moments of intense precision.
I designed one propulsion system that took three years to engineer and build. The actual firing sequence? Forty-three seconds of carefully monitored cataclysm.
Try selling a movie on that premise.
Try having the most exciting parts of the story happen in a room full of guys staring at computer screens.
Which brings me back to my original point. When science is ignored for the sake of “sciencey movie magic” it makes it hard for the general populous to wrap their head around what space flight actually IS.
They get upset that movies don’t portray space flight how they think it should rather than how it is.
Which is too bad, because there are films that do it well. Apollo 13 had it right. Sure, some of the dramatic license was taken with how quickly they built the CO2 scrubbers, but that whole scene of them jury-rigging solutions with random spacecraft parts was textbook problem solving under pressure.
Tom Cruise was fantastic in The Right Stuff and portrayed that methodical madness that test pilots exhibited when they first began flying into space.
Space is hard and constrained by a lot of physics. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with it or tell good stories within those constraints.
I could go on, but I think you get my point.
How about it Hollywood? Think you can keep our butts in those seats with some realistic physics?
John spent forty years designing real spacecraft before turning his attention to fictional ones. Writing from Oregon, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to sci-fi—separating good speculation from bad physics while keeping his sense of wonder firmly intact.