Hollywood Never Let Physics Ruin a Scene
Movies about astronauts usually have to choose between scientific realism and keeping you entertained, and some productions lean very heavily toward the latter. As fun as they were on the big screen, these five movies take especially generous liberties with just about everything about astronauts and their work!
1. Armageddon
Armageddon famously asked one thing: accept that NASA could train a group of oil drillers to become astronauts quickly enough to save Earth. Yeah, not likely. In reality, mastering spacecraft operations and spacewalks means extensive training. Hilariously, NASA has even used the movie in training exercises where participants identify its inaccuracies.
2. Gravity
Gravity looks convincing enough, but don’t confuse its visuals with orbital accuracy. The film has astronauts traveling easily between the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, even though they occupy very different orbits. Its wildly destructive chain reaction of space debris also unfolds far faster than such mechanics would allow in real life.
3. Moonfall
Once Moonfall reveals that the Moon is just a big artificial structure, scientific realism is no longer in play. The astronauts contend with lunar gravity behaving strangely and spacecraft maneuvers that would make actual mission planners nervous. That said, it's entertaining precisely because it treats astrophysics with such liberty.
4. Mission to Mars
Released in 2000, Mission to Mars imagines astronauts reaching the Red Planet and encountering evidence of an ancient Martian civilization. Beyond the base storyline, the movie also takes substantial liberties with emergency spacecraft maneuvers. One dramatic sequence even has astronauts attempting a rescue between spacecraft, which is a generous take on what real people could accomplish.
5. Space Cowboys
Space Cowboys is a hilarious film with tons of star power. It sends four elderly former test pilots into orbit because they're supposedly the only people capable of repairing an old satellite. The thing is, NASA wouldn't normally build an emergency mission around a crew chosen mainly because they understand decades-old hardware.
