Yeah, like just putting bags over the hole you just drilled, instead of that weird static electricity solution. I also found it weird that when they initially drilled the hole from the inside and somehow(?!) missed, nobody thought to slap something on the hole to at least slow the air down. Hell, it’s at most 17 pounds per square inch of pressure over the area of that little hole, you could put your palm over it temporarily and suffer nothing more than the equivalent of frostbite and a hickey. Instead, they just ran out of the room and lost half their habitation.
Robert Heinlein addressed something similar in his tale “Gentlemen, Be Seated” (on the moon, trapped in a chamber which springs a leak; said leak patched by one of the men dropping trou and sitting on it).
So yeah - the whole “drill into a wall but carefully or we’re SCREWED” suggests nobody on the planning side ever thought of the need for an emergency patch job. Space debris, anyone?
Also: how much water did they actually get from that spacewalk? It CAN’T have been enough to keep them going for the rest of the trip - not from one EVA anyway. And did they patch the hole afterward? also not clear - but otherwise the rest of the water is gonna blow away and do nobody any good.
It was there for radiation protection - which might become less of a problem the further they got from the sun. Hopefully any resulting cancers would be slow-growing, at least. And I guess with the Pegasus supply rocket they were expecting to be able to replenish it - and maybe finally patch all those holes they’d drilled.
I had the same problem with the amount, but they didn’t have to drill a hole for the outside water supply. They just opened the valve that the tank was filled through. Close it back up and no hole.
I just started watching this last night. It was “okay”. I would have thought the crew would know each other better after having been working/training for 2 years prior to the launch. That is, you would think the dissent after the fire incident while in transit to the moon would have come up much earlier.
One really bizarre thing I noticed: in the first episode, during the last press conference before departing for the Moon, the American flag patch on Swank’s uniform is backward - mirrored (the stars are on the right side). Was this an “oops” ? Is this ever explained ?
I was thinking maybe someone mirrored the shots in post-production, but then all the other crew would mysteriously swap positions at the table.
This explains it a bit. (ETA: In short, the blue part goes toward the front of a person or vehicle when displayed on the side.)
That is the norm for wear of the patch on the right shoulder of US military uniforms. A quick search shows an image with right shoulder wear of the flag patch by Swank on coveralls. I would call it by design rather than an oops.
That wear is so that the field of blue is always to the front of the body. It would be reversed (aka the normal way the flag is displayed) on the left shoulder. That matches the way the flag would be seen if carried on a staff as the carrier advances in still air.