Thursday, July 25, 2013

Double trouble in space (movies)

Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the problems that have occurred for the world's manned space missions have occurred either during training, during liftoff, or during re-entry.   Gemini 8 went into an uncontrolled spin, which was handled by the commander of the mission, Neil Armstrong, perhaps pushing him to the front of the line for the first moon landing (his co-pilot was David Scott).  And obviously Apollo 13 had a serious emergency in space.

Despite that fact, there have been several movies about disasters of various types in space:  Marooned, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010:Odyssey Two, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Alien, Sphere, Prometheus, Space Cowboys, Forbidden Planet, Mission to Mars  (yes, I'm throwing a wide net here).   This even though space is generally empty, pretty much uninhabited, and we haven't had a lot of problems up there.   Except for the occasionally malfunctioning urine recycler and air conditioning system.
But two movies coming out soon are realistic, and there are problems in space.  I'm really interested in how they're going to solve the main problem in the second one, Gravity.  (And as an aside, Gravity might bring a little attention to the real space debris problem.)

As a public service, here are the two trailers for Europa Report and Gravity:





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