I imagine the better way forward with current tech would be a Google-glass type of device that the astronauts could wear.
Really good movie.
Do they actually train all the astronauts on how to be a pilot? That seemed like a movie invention.
About twenty years ago, I worked for a very small company doing work for NASA and the military. My project was building replacement displays for the Shuttle simulator, but a co-worker was working on heads-up displays for the International Space Station. The idea was to use holographic optical elements; basically holograms adhered to the inside surface of the spherical helmet. The idea was that even though the holograms were concave, they might be acting as flat or convex mirrors or lenses. It didn’t work very well. But this was after NASA and others calculated that the ISS would need about 2,000 hours of external maintenance. In other words, they would have needed one person devoted to doing maintenance work. (Sometime later they started to investigate using robots for maintenance.)
The Japanese title for this film is indeed Zero Gravity.
JpnGal and I saw the IMAX-3D version at the local cinema. It was great popcorn fun! So much fun that I actually dropped my popcorn bucket. Grrrr.
It’s at 652M but the theater counts are down to about 300…so I don’t think I’m going to be surprised, but it will be close!
ETA: domestic theater counts, that is. the film’s presence in foreign markets is why I think it could still edge close to 700M.
It might get a resurgence from Oscar nominations, though. Depending on what Oscar nominations it gets, of course.
I think it’s likely to get quite a lot of nominations–probably the second highest total tally, behind 12 Years a Slave. 9-10 nominations easily (and likely 3-4 awards, at least).
Is it an original script? What nominations would you predict?
Definite nominations:
Picture
Director
Cinematography
Editing
Sound
Sound Editing
Visual FX
Very Likely:
Actress
Production Design
Very Possible but not a sure thing:
Original Screenplay
Score
Based on nominations so far this year, I think American Hustle, Her, and Inside Llewyn Davis are also in the running. This will be the most interesting awards season in a long time.
Saw it at long last recently. Just a couple of question which have not been to my knowledge answered in this thread
-
When Stone wears the Russian Spacesuit in the Soyuz.I thought EVA suits were a completely different species to launch and reentry pressure suits and would not protect her on an EVA? If that was an EVA suit, why would it be stowed inside the Soyuz? How long could she be out in a pressure suit?
-
What could have caused the Soyuz parachute to deploy? Would it even have been possible with the Orbital module still attache to the rentry module?
-
Would Stone (a mission specialist) even be trained to fly? I thought mission specialists were generally not, unless they had been assigned to fly the Soyuz, where all IIRC crewmembers have to be trained in flight. At least thats the impression I got from Chris Hadfield’s book.
[QUOTE=CookingWithGas]
I saw the movie last night and have only gotten through the first half of these posts. But I haven’t seen anyone talk about the part of the plot that bothered me the most: Stone survives against impossible odds. Not challenging, not heroic, impossible. The Challenger crew were all doomed from an O-ring failure. The Columbia crew all died because of a loose heat shield tile. But she makes it through three spacecraft that are all nearly destroyed by massive debris traveling over Mach 25 and somehow gets home safely in a Chinese vehicle that she’s had no experience with. Even though she crashed the Soyuz in the simulator. Every time.
[/QUOTE]
Meh. Its a movie afterall. And Gordon Cooper landed his Mercury Spacecraft after a complete systems failure, and that craft was not designed with manual landing in mind./ Neil Armstrong landed back safely after a major malfunction on Gemini 8. Apollo 12 went to the moon after being struck by lightning.
A pressure suit is a pressure suit. It can either withstand vacuum, or it can’t.
Although the features of various space environment suits differ, and a suit intended for extended EVAs will have features to protect the user from radiation, solar thermal, and other hazards, as well as self-contained rebreathing apparatus and hygiene contra, for a short exposure any pressure suit with an air supply would be usable in space. What is more unlikely (and not shown in the film) is Bullock’s character being able to put on the suit herself without assistance. I don’t know which version of the Russian Orlan suit she was wearing, but it has a number of undergarments which have to be assembled in a certain order and a semi-rigid shell. On the other hand, it is designed for easy entry and minimal prebreathing (unlike the NASA EMU suit which requires 45 minutes of prebreathing).
The parachutes for the descent module are stored in two bays at the forward end of the module (seen in this picture flanking the head of the center astronaut). There are elliptical hatches on the forward exterior of the capsule, and at the correct altitude the hatches are released and the parachute drogues are ejected via mortar. Presumably some piece of debris initiated one of the mortars.
Mission specialists go through basic flight operations training. Realistically, there is very little ‘flying’ required for reentry; in essence, a reentry profile is loaded to the flight computer, the pilot hits the “Go Home” button, and for the most part, the process is automated. (The final glide profile for the Shuttle Orbiter was manually flown, but only because it is the least challenging part of the flight; virtually every other part of both ascent and reentry is controlled by computer, which follows the profile to a precision and responds to inputs at a speed not possible by a human pilot.) There is some legitimate question about how she would know how to fly the Chinese Shenzhou, but the film makes light of that issue.
Stranger
I saw the movie the other weekend. Overall, it was entertaining. I think the plot was fine and the storytelling told the story it intended to tell. This was not an examination of the politics of the Russians blowing up a satellite and causing a space disaster. It was not a story of sexual escapades in zero-g. It was not an examination of how everyone on Earth was waiting in knuckle-biting tension for the Explorer astronauts.
This was the story of the lone survivor struggling her way through the perils of space, and overcoming her own emotional intertia of living to rediscover a desire for life, and fighting to achieve it.
I did have some issues with the science aspects. In general, I think they did a very good job with the physics and the look and the motion. The visuals are stunning. The hardware is pretty well done (with one minor exception I will mention later).
A few elements for storytelling purposes bugged me from science purposes.
First, the movie just fundamentally has a problem with space being BIG. I didn’t get that this is an alternate universe where the Hubble, ISS, and a Chinese station are in nearby orbits. That didn’t translate to me. Rather, I took it as the filmmakers missed the mark on that fundamental concept. It plays out in how rapidly the debris issue spreads across the satellites, how geosych satellites and low Earth satellites are falling victim simultaneously.
So even though they tell is the maneuvering unit is a new design, that it has been in use for 5 hours already when we first see Clooney zipping around, and apparently he’s only halfway through it’s fuel supply, it just crashes my reality filter for them to make the transition from HST to ISS.
And the orbital mechanics issues of orbit transfers are largely a similar concern. However, if we concede for whatever reason the stations are all in similar orbits, then it is conceivable that the transfers work and the orbital mechanics concerns become less noticable, because for short distances, a point and go method should work reasonably well. It’s only over distances where the orbital path curves that the funkiness of orbital mechanics shows its head.
I was bugged by some of the astronaut behavior. Clooney zooming around on his maneuvering unit - if we presume it is a new design and his task is to test drive it for the full 10 hours, then doing donuts and whatnot makes much more sense. I’m hard pressed to see how he could carry that much fuel in that small a package, but with the stated parameters, his liberal fuel use is much more explainable. He has fuel to burn and is tasked with burning it, so he’s basically playing in order to get a feel and see just how fine-tuned he can get his reactions.
But then there’s the other astronaut who is tethered to the shuttle aft bulkhead and just hurling himself away from the shuttle to jolt at the end of the tether. I suppose one could conceivably argue with Clooney’s wonder buggy handy he could risk tether failure from repeated abuse, but the reality is that just doesn’t fit with NASA protocols nor any type of sense, nor would spacewalk schedules permit an astronaut such goof off time. Every moment EVA is highly scripted and timelined to fit as much goodness in the available time. Sure, sometimes things run long or fall short, but EVAs pack in plenty of “get ahead” tasks for just that contingency. That was a ridiculous element to me.
Also, I don’t buy NASA getting some doctor specialist who simultaneously designed the hardware upgrade to HST and then got trained as a mission specialist to be the only one who could install the system on orbit. Just not realistic IMO. There are teams of engineers on the ground to develop the hardware for that task, and teams of engineers to train the astronauts on how to use that hardware, and there’s just no way the only person who could install it is the designer.
And of course she’s a biomedical engineer building telescope hardware systems. 
I’m also aware of the debris speed problems - the visible debris, the lack of peppershot that should have shredded them, the precision of the orbital intercepts.
Still, getting past all that, it overall worked pretty well and had a lot that seemed right. The bouncing around on the end of the tether, the dynamics of trying to grab something, the dynamics of the Shuttle and ISS being ripped apart and such.
How much oxygen would she have had in her suit after running out of oxygen in the tank? She sure did a lot then.
And the line about “I’ve never prayed before, nobody ever taught me how” made me :rolleyes:.
That is the point I mentioned above. It’s not just long underwear. It is an essential component of the EMU system. It is long underwear that has plastic tubing running through it, so that water is pumped through the tubing. That is the Liquid Cooled Undergarment (IIRC). It is part of the internal heat regulation system of the EMU. The astronaut can pump cool water through to remove their body heat, so they don’t cook while in a sealed bag sitting in the sun. They can adjust the cooling so when in the Earth’s shadow and not being baked on a spit they don’t freeze.
Seeing the discussion about the embryo/fetus symbology, I guess I can see why having that would have been an obstacle to the flow of the scene. But it is a definite miss from the hardware design standpoint.
Yes, I don’t think they should have been pressurized.
Which is due to a combination of the suit operational pressure and gas mixture, versus the pressure that ISS is operated.
As fine as these films are (especially by Jonze and the Coens), I have a hard time seeing any of them earning more than 5 nominations. Maybe 6 if they’re lucky (this goes for Nebraska), too).
Films like Argo are usually the exception–usually, the winner comes from the film with the top 2 or 3 nominations. Slave has historical weight and extraordinary acting and emotional power. Gravity is tight, compelling, and visually remarkable. I think Picture/Director are very likely going to one of them (or perhaps, with a split, both)
At a guess, I’d say that Gravity will win Director, and Twelve Years a Slave will win Picture. But don’t take my word on it; I’m about as far from an expert as they get.
I think the split could go both ways–12 Years takes Picture (historical drama) and Gravity takes Director (visionary material), like Argo/Life of Pi
Or Gravity (popular crowd-pleaser) takes Picture and 12 Years (weighty subject matter) takes Director, like Chicago/The Pianist.
Or 12 Years takes both, since the last Best Picture to win with slavery as its subject matter was Gone With the Wind, and Steve McQueen would be the first black Director to win.
Alfonso Cuaron would be the first Hispanic/Latino to win, but I think Gravity taking both categories is the least likely of the four scenarios.
(and who knows? With 8-10 Best Picture nominees, a spoiler might sneak in, too)
My thinking is that Gravity is a very good example of a movie that’s very much the result of the director’s specific vision.
Yeah, me too. Twelve Years A Slave was a great movie, but it was so because of a lot of factors. Gravity, is so much a director’s movie - with the vision, planning and such that had to go into it - stands head and shoulders above.
Both feature great directing, but Gravity also features an amazing director’s accomplishment.
The Right Stuff was directed by Philip Kaufman, not Ridley Scott.
As for Gravity’s box office so far: Gravity - Box Office Mojo