I began streaming “For All Mankind”. I’m in season two, and wondering about a few things.
The most obvious is that there is no transmission lag between Earth and Moon, but I am willing to accept that for dramatic reasons, and saving time.
How are they getting space shuttles to the moon? How are they transferring from the shuttle to a lander? Is Pathfinder’s nuclear engine later discussed or explained?
Through the power of stupidity. They stopped pretending to operate within a plausible reality early on.
Thanks, Darren_Garrison. That is depressing. I’d hoped that the alternate history had meant a change in shuttle design. There was a mention of refueling in space. They also launched the new Pathfinder shuttle from a 747, a la James Bond…
I have never seen the show but from the clips I’ve seen there are many obvious gaps in basic physics and technology. With respect to the Space Transportation System (‘Shuttle’), it is definitely true that it does not have sufficient impulse (‘delta-V’) in the Orbital Maneuvering system thrusters to achieve a trans-Lunar injection trajectory. Most of the thrust at launch from the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB), and all of the propellants for the Shuttle Main Engine came from the External Tank (ET) which was consumed after being detached and was not reusable. (There were proposals to carry the ET into orbit to create a Skylab-like ‘wet lab’ or to construct a modular space station but they never went past a concept stage.)
Although Enterprise was lofted from the dedicated 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft to test landing systems, the aircraft obviously could not carry the shuttle with the SRBs and ET attached, so launching from a 747 is a preposterous conceit. Furthermore, the Shuttle would not be able to withstand reentry from a Lunar orbit trajectory because the thermal protection systems were not designed for that load, so even if some ‘nuclear engine’ (I’m guessing a NERVA-type nuclear thermal engine) was used to achieve Lunar orbit, it would never be able to return.
All of this is a shame because there is a real interesting history in the “What if?” of both US and Soviet space programs, although in practice I doubt that either of them would achieve permanent lunar bases or a crewed Mars mission. While I doubt it would be of general interest I’d really like to see a narrative series that examined all of the multitude of uncrewed planetary exploration proposals that went through the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the wake of the Voyager program because there were some really innovative proposals from “Team X” for interplanetary and orbital observatory missions as well as an enduring space exploration infrastructure that would have made it easier and cheaper to perform outer planets missions. Instead, JPL has mostly been stuck with a focus on Mars and the occasionally Venus, Jovian, and Saturnian system probes and no missions to Uranus or Neptune; at least we got New Horizons although that was an APL-led mission.
Stranger
It was just the plain old Shuttle Orbiter from this timeline transported into a timeline where Apollo wasn’t cancelled and a permanent US lunar base was established in 1973. They stuck it in there because people know what the space shuttle looks like, not because it made a lick of sense to design and build exactly the same thing in that timeline (which also has Sea Dragons). The nuclear shuttles came later.
If you think a Space Shuttle Orbiter to the moon is stupid, in season 4 North Korea puts the first two men on Mars using a Soyuz module.
If you think a Space Shuttle Orbiter to the moon is stupid, in season 4 North Korea puts the first two men on Mars using a Soyuz module.
Jesus Christ.
I wonder if I can get my ten bucks back from Apple TV.
I mean, they also have gravity in their space stations, don’t they?
I think they should compensate me for the ten hours I wasted watching the first series of Foundation even though I did it on a free trial but so far no dice.
Stranger
I’ve never watched, for I was certain they would screw up Asimov’s stories.
It isn’t just that they differed from the stories, which as a “fix-up”, didn’t have a lot of narrative consistency, and certainly wasn’t suitable as a direct adaptation into a film or continuous miniseries. It is that it completely deviated from the basic themes of the Foundation and psychohistory, and then just ended up in a big pointless girl-fight for…reasons. Great imagery, they hired some excellent actors (Jared Harris, Lee Pace, Leah Harvey, Clarke Peters), and there were some interesting plot threads, but it held together like a cotton candy quilt. There were individual elements, such as the Emperor’s story that could have been interesting in their own right, although at best tangential to the essential story of Asimov’s Foundation, but even those weren’t well explored. It was just complete rubbish as a narrative, and I honestly don’t know what anyone thought the point of it was supposed to be.
Stranger
An aside, but I started the thread.
I wonder how many see film adaptations without reading the book. A friend of mine liked the film “Something Wicked this Way Comes”, but couldn’t get through the book. It is a good film, but unable to describe nearly as well as the book.
The lag between Earth and Moon is two seconds. Round trip. It’s not worth portraying on screen.
I would guess the large majority.
Definitely true for me. It’s rare that I’ve read the source book first.
And in my experience, which medium you encounter first tends to be the one you like better. For example, I saw Field of Dreams more than once and many years before I read Shoeless Joe. In that order, I saw the point of skipped plot elements and changed characters making for a tighter, better movie. If I had read the book first, I most likely would have been annoyed by every change.
(Aaaaand, thread fully derailed.)
That’s ok,we’ve determined that they largely ignore physics. I just watched an episode where they used a solar sail to move towards the sun.
I’m also annoyed by the degree of soap opera that goes on in this series.
That’s just tacky.
To clarify: Yes, you can in fact use a solar sail to move closer to the Sun, analogous (but not directly corresponding) to how you can sail upwind in a sailboat. The “obvious” way to use a solar sail, to go straight outwards, only works if your spacecraft (including sail and payload) is extremely lightweight: I’m not even certain that we have any sail materials lightweight enough to make it work. The actual, practical way to use a solar sail is based on the sail being reflective, and tilting it one way or another to alter your orbit, and depending on which way you tilt it, you can speed up or slow down in your orbit (and hence enlarge or shrink the orbit). This can in principle be used with a spacecraft and sail of any weight, though of course, the more weight per area, the slower it’ll work.
The solar sail looks large from a Hollywood POV but is tiny from a real physics POV. Note the image in thus reddit post.
Yeah, they really need to trim some of this nonsense.