I love the scenario in Destination: Moon. The scientists/engineers in charge of the project perform an unauthorized launch before “sinister forces” in Washington can prevent them from taking off. When their electronics expert comes down with appendicitis (or some other ailment), grease monkey “Joe” is conscripted as the fourth crew member.
They fly to the Moon and back with no specialized training or contingency planning whatsoever. Amazing! :eek:
Who was dumb in Gravity?
Yeah, nobody dumb in *Gravity *or The Martian - whole lot of smart in the latter one. Sadly Life, after a decent start, had ten times more dumb than Abbot and Costello. They could have sent Mr. Bean into space and gotten better results.
Uh, Europa Report is one of the most realistic sci-fi movies out there.
Granted, it’s a boring movie if your expectation is to see muscle bound guys smoking cigars and hunting down aliens with flame throwers.
But for an intelligent sci fi flick, ER is a damn fine movie. (Which, ironically, is why it flopped in the box office)
You’ve hit on one of the core factors in this trope: in this context, space exploration isn’t some noble endeavor meriting the highest efforts of humanity’s best and brightest. It’s a job:
[Quote=Elton John]
And all this science I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man
[/quote]
Truckers in space. Merchant marines in space. Martinet officers and schlub sailors in space. Not the cream of the crop. Not the best of the best of the best, SIR. Just Joe Sixpack in space.
And that’s why they can be dumb.
:smack: Sorry, I confused scenes of it with Interstellar. Martian was actually great. My bad.
True, true. Maybe nostalgia colored my perception. Weaver was great, though.
Yeah!!! Probably my all-time favorite movie.
Seriously? The Sandra Bullock character.
Interstellar had a similar problem with a damsel-in-distress astronaut.
Those movies just don’t do justice to professional women, much less astronauts, making them seem like hapless, hysterical crybabies.
Am I misremembering this movie? Didn’t they encounter a giant space squid, try to chase it, and got eaten?
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it too. But I don’t recall them chasing anything. They landed on Eroupa and were basically like “Holy shit! Squid monster!” (It took them a minute to figure that out) They did try to save their friend but other than that, the rest of the movie was them trying to get the fuck out of there.
The Apollo 1 disaster predates the moon landing.
In the documentary Moon Shot, Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton attributes the problem to what he calls “Go Fever” – basically, everyone’s so focused on pushing forward towards success that they tend to ignore potential problems and mistakes. It’s only after a spectacular disaster that people sit back and think, “Gee, maybe we shouldn’t launch the space shuttle at below-freezing temperatures…”
They were still trying to bullshit the investigation until Feynman cut through it all with a tiny C-clamp and a pitcher of ice water.
And of course, maybe you don’t give the contract for the boosters to a company in a landlocked state so you don’t have to put seams in the rocket in the first place. Pork killed that crew.
I’ll take your word for it. I remember loving the first half and then walking away disappointed at the silliness after the second half, but maybe the crew tried their best when faced with unexpected space squid ™. My own biases towards uberastronauts is showing, I guess.
I’m not buying the complaint with Gravity. Yeah, I’ll admit that Bullock’s survival mostly wasn’t due to intelligence. But what it was due to, mostly, was plucky determination, and that’s a good thing, too. Nor was she ever particularly stupid. She was in over her head on the piloting, but then, that wasn’t her job, and she still managed it anyway. And yes, she spent a lot of time coping with her emotions, but she did cope with them and got the job done.
And The Martian is not only an exception to the OP’s claim; it’s arguably the exception that completely disproves the rule. I defy you to find any other movie, from any era, that so exemplifies a person smarting their way through their problems.
“I’m going to have to science the *shit *out of this!”
Maybe “stupid” was too strong a word, but I strongly believe that a character like hers would not be suitable for spaceflight (unless this is the distant future, where space travel is commoditized). Why could they have not picked a more emotionally stable, better trained, biomedical engineer? “Plucky determination” seems a terrible excuse for “ability to remain calm and think quickly under fire”. She freaked the fuck out multiple times and barely made it through, mostly with help from the other character, and her behavior jeopardized survival for both of them. She was a risk to the mission in a way an astronaut should not need to be. But then again, look at the president. Maybe it’s a sign of the times when brashness is an acceptable substitute for thoughtfulness – in space or on earth.
Compare her to the leads in Contact, Alien, Terminator, Arrival, and to a lesser extent even Rogue One and Guardians of the Galaxy… she’s just a crybaby in comparison.
If she were inexplicably the last astronaut remaining, then fine, her performance in space was admirable. But how was she selected for the mission to begin with in a field with so many better candidates?! I hope they do not pick astronauts based on dramatic appeal.
Absolutely. It was one of the good ones, and sorry I confused the matter by suggesting that someone in it died.
Actually, they were aware of the troubles with the O-rings in cold weather which is why they delayed the launch until later in the day (when it was warmer but still the coldest launch ever) so it was a measured risk that was thought to be acceptable. (Even the engineers of the solid rocket boosters were divided on their conclusions
As for the seams in the rocket, no matter where it was built, it had to be transported somehow and transportation is easier in smaller sections.
Yes, I know that other sections (most notably the external tank) were transported by barge.
The entire failure is very interesting, a lot of little items combined to create a major disaster.
Same thing with the Colombia accident. They were aware that there MAY have been a problem but didn’t think it to be serious enough to warrant further actions.
Hindsight is always 20/20!!!
In '57-59 the 3 Stooges made at a feature and two shorts with them going to Venus in each one. Not sure how many other spaceflight adventures they got into.
In the 60s there was of course the late-great Bill Dana’s Jose Jimenez.
Also in the 60s, Major Healey on I Dream of Jeanie was something of a dolt.
Ava? She, sorry, it managed to succeed in the AI-box experiment, after all.
I can recall being surprised that Astronauts aren’t more self sufficient. That every move is planned, choreographed and endlessly rehearsed on Earth during training. The Hubbell repair is an example.
We have to move away from that if deep space missions are ever attempted. uh Houston, we have a problem isn’t going to cut it. We need problem solving engineers in space that can fix it themselves.
Chracters like Scotty and Miles O’Brien are needed on real life missions.
They do all that pre-planning not because they have to, but because they can. Any engineer would do the same.
A lot may have had to do with the earliest astronauts/candidates themselves. Once they found out about it, former all-star-hero-stud test pilots did not take kindly to an essentially passive role as cargo (in Chuck Yeager’s famous phrase, “Spam in a can.”) on what was basically a glorified ballistic missile, following a bunch of rhesus and spider monkeys, macaques, and chimpanzees which had pretty much the same mission responsibilities as they were given.
What? Are you talking about the one scene where she refused to give up on grabbing the research data computer on the ocean planet?