I like Danny Boyle just fine. I just don’t like movies about pretty-boy astronauts that are so emotionally fragile they can’t do their job properly.
Actually, tiles fall off the Shuttle on nearly every mission. They’re actually glued on to a high temperature felt fabric that is sown on to the Shuttle structure; I kid you not. As long as only a few fail at widely spread points the Shuttle maintains positive margin. The problem is when the reinforced pyrolytic carbon-carbon leading edges are damaged, allowing hot gases to directly impinge upon the aluminum wing structure. The heating, by the way, isn’t primarily due to viscous skin “friction” with the tenuous upper atmosphere, but rather due to heating from ram pressure as the forward aspect of the Shuttle compresses air in front of it which is then trapped by the sonic pressure wave.
Heating of a probe by the Sun is a completely different mechanism, specifically incident solar radiation. The trick of cooling a shield protecting a probe is to either radiate heat away behind it (re-radiation), allow parts of the shield to evaporate and carry away the heat (ablative/evaporative cooling), or just absorb the heat for the duration of the mission (heat sink). It was never clear how the Icarus vessels were cooling their shields, but the shielding systems seemed enormously complex.
As for both the science and story of Sunshine, I have to agree with GuanoLad that it was closer to Event Horizon (with a bit of The Core thrown in) than 2001: A Space Odyssey with which it was frequently compared. Almost nothing in the film was a realistic portrayal of either solar physics or spaceship operation, including the fact that parts of the ship that were clearly not rotating still experienced simulated gravity. And it was never clear why–even setting aside the whole “restarting the Sun” premise–a manned mission had to be mounted. For the cost of even one vessel, much less two, dozens of packages could have been delivered by automated or remote probes. And descending into the “lunatic killer” trope removed any degree of thematic credibility, regardless of the science quality of the film.
Stranger
Where was the science advisor for the part where two guys without space suits have to make a short trip through space to an airlock?
The guys apparently are unconcerned with the rapid decompression, but instead are worried about the cold of space.
Ridiculous. Space is an excellent insulator. They would have to remain out in space for a long time, before suffering from any sort of cold related issues. The decompression, on the other hand has to be prepared for. All air must be expelled from the lungs. Unconsciousness will happen relatively quickly. And if not re pressurized fairly quickly, death is likely to occur. Freezing would have been the least of their problems.
Not to overthink this confused movie, but just arguing about the manned/unmanned mission issue - given that the payload of the mission was a bomb with the mass ‘of Manhattan’ that contained something like all the remaining fissile material from Earth (presumably the previous mission also had a Manhattan-sized bomb), it seems silly to quibble about the mass of life support, etc. for eight astronauts.
Much was made in the movie about the fact that the ship was entering an area of communications blackout, and was cut off from Earth. Given the absolutely mindbogglingly critical importance of the mission, having some humans aboard as a backup to automated systems seems only prudent. Although why 8 astronauts instead of 100…
I had a thought about the bomb the mass of Manhattan, by the way. Suppose that 99% of that was just carbon , with only 1% being the mass of the bomb. How long might such a mass survive in the outer layers of the sun as it falls toward the core? Minutes? Hours? Call it, say, a million tons of heat shielding/heat sink.
Not that there aren’t a bunch of other valid objections to this film.
uh… what? So indefatigable-human-bomb is somehow more powerful than the sun-that-is-a-bomb?
I hate hollywood. I’ll be skipping this movie.
Hollywood is the most powerful bomb of all.
Hush your mouths! It’s a good film.
So, could we get astronauts inside Mercury’s orbit?
Definitely. But for how long? I sat down and did the calculation with regard to astronauts wanting to orbit closer to the sun indefinitely. Someone may need to chime in who knows about exotic materials, however, because I am working under the assumption that in general highly reflective materials have a low emissivity (and vice versa). For example highly polished silver is both one of the most reflective materials as well as one of the least emissive. This is a catch-22 for anyone wanting to design some sort of solar reflector: it may reflect away much of the sun’s radiation, but it will likewise “cool off” very slowly. So for now I will ignore those variables.
At mercury’s orbit, the solar reflector’s equilibrium temperature would be about: 150C. Easily hot enough to boil the astronauts alive. Are there any tricks to get around this? Yes. The reflector’s average temperature will be 150C, but we could arrange things so that some parts of it are colder than other parts. For example, consider Mercury itself. One side of the planet gets colder than -150C before morning, and the other side gets over 350C before evening. This is because Mercury is rotating, and one part gets heated, then rotates into the shade to cool off before morning. So even though the average temperature is too hot for an astronaut, the dark side of Mercury is too cold!
This idea will only work so long as the hot side of the reflector doesn’t melt. How close to the sun can the reflector orbit without reaching the melting point of, say, Tungsten (3400C)? My back-of-the-envelope calculation yields about: 3 Million km from the sun. Things get much worse as you try to get closer than that.
Suppose you do want to get closer than that, but only want to zip by, say only spending 10 seconds less than 3 Million km from the sun. The answer to that depends on how much money you got, and whether you want to be able to look out the window ;). If you make your solar reflector massive enough, it could take years before it heats up appreciably.
Note that, for example, this solar probe has plans to get very close to the sun (6 Million km) for a quick flyby.
I do not see a huge problem with the shield; highly reflective surface, resistance to solar wind, cooling; all technical challenges with eventual limits. At some point you reach an ambient temperature in the sun’s atmosphere where plasma is the only material phase able to exist.
I did have other questions about why the hell would you have a communications antennae rotating around a central crew quarters? As Stranger mentioned, how the heck do they get gravity in the crew quarters? Isn’t this a little backwards? Obviously the artistic director thought it would be cool to have something rotate - so why not at least make it the right thing?
I assume both the space craft must have been orbiting the sun, but for some reason I had the impression that they were somehow hovering above it, which I found distracting.
Any realism or immersion was long ago totally ruined for me by the plot decay into zombie serial killer territory. I went to this movie with the impression that it was supposed to be thoughtful and was deeply disappointed. Zombie serial killer? WTF??!!!
And couldn’t they find better crew than a bunch of immature, feuding (about what is really not clear) twenty somethings?
The sun doomed by some mysterious soliton particle was an interesting concept, but this was never explained in the movie itself.
If some of you enjoyed this movie, I do not want to take that away, but I thought it was terrible for something that was supposed to be the next 2001. If put in with the slasher genre where it seems drawn to I suppose it would be exemplary. Zowie Bowie’s Moon was a much better modern, thoughtful scifi. I am sure there is lots of bad science in it also, but it was thoughtful and good storytelling.
I did a little back of the envelope calculation to see how close you can get. The way to do it is to use multiple levels of thermal radiation shields to protect the crew. You take advantage of the fact that deep space is at a temperature of a few Kelvin, essentially zero for all practical purposes. Each level of the shield should be highly reflective (low emissivity) on the hot (sun) side and black (high emissivity) on the cold (deep space) side. There are lots of engineering details, but the limit will be set by the first shield. I assume that I can make it really big, so I can dump as much heat to deep space as possible and ignore the radiation from the other shields that protect the crew. I will also assume that the shield is thick enough and has high enough thermal conductivity that I can assume it is isothermal (the temperature is the same everywhere). I can write an expression for the radius of my closest orbit R in terms of the sun’s Radius Rs, the temperature of my shield T, the surface temperature of the sun Ts, and the emissivity of the shiny side of the shield e:
R = Rs * sqrt(e/(1+e)) * (Ts/T)^2
Let’s design our first shield to run at the melting temperature of Tungsten ~3700 K. The emissivity of Tungsten is ~0.25. Using 5800 K for the sun’s surface temperature, I get R/Rs = 1.1, meaning I can be virtually on the surface of the sun. More realistically 
let’s put in a factor of two safety margin and only allow the first shield to run at half the melting temperature. Then, I get R/Rs = 4.4. For comparison, mercury’s orbit is about 70 times the sun’s radius. Highly polished tungsten could do even better.
Don’t try this at home.
Sanity check: If the shiny side of your shield had an emissivity of 0, you would expect to be able to get arbitrarily close, but that doesn’t seem to be reflected in your equation. And I assume that the lack of an emissivity factor for the dark side is because you’re assuming that’s a perfect blackbody?
Also, even though tungsten has the highest melting point, you might get better results with, say, silver, with a lower melting point but also lower emissivity.
EDIT: No, wait, your equation does work. For some reason, I was thinking that the e in the numerator of the square root was the exponential constant.
Yes, polished silver can have an exceptionally low emissivity, but since the expression is proportional to the square root of emissivity, but inversely with the square of the melting temperature, polished Tungsten probably still wins. Perhaps you can use a coating of molten silver on the sun side.
And, yes, I am assuming the side facing deep space is very black, so e ~ 1.
If I knew someplace to easily look up emissivities (or equivalently albedos) of various materials, I’d check both of them, and also probably take a look at platinum and iridium (both of which melt hotter than silver, but still have a reputation for shinyness).
The problem people have with the movie is that they think it is about a group of astronauts jump-starting a dying sun, which it’s not, any more than 28 Days Later is a movie about zombies taking over Great Britain (which it’s really not, either).
In both movies, the major crisis is pretty much an excuse for a psychological thriller type film. How do people act under extreme stress? Away from the comforts of the society they grew up in?
As for the final-reel genre change, yeah, 28 Days Later did that too. I dunno how Sunshine plays it, but in 28 Days Later:
The main character has to drop his meek civilized persona and embrace the savage animalistic side in order to save his friends from the soldiers who have less-than-civilized plans for them. He can no longer rely on the norms of society for protection, and finally learns to drops them entirely when needed. Bonus points for him effectively becoming the slasher character in his own movie while still being a good guy.
Also, there are zombies. 
I have it on BluRay and updated my player’s firmware last week- now I can’t make those dumb extras go away either.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature! 
In other news, getting a Blu-Ray drive for my computer. Curious as to if this will turn out to be more trouble than I’m expecting. My video card says it can do Blu-Ray video, so I’m wondering if that means it will decode the discs so I can watch them on my PC, or if it just means that “Yep, we can render video at an unimpressively low resolution of 1080p when needed”
No, that means it’s been HDCP certified. Because of the copy protection that’s on Blu-ray movies, everything you use in order to be able to watch them needs to have this certification or else the picture quality will automatically be downgraded.
So it would go from middling-def to regular-def? Will I have a problem with my VGA monitor?
Possibly, but it’s hard to say. Either way, the copy protection system has been cracked, so as long as you’ve purchased the rights to use the media you can just strip the DRM from the files if it comes to that.
Fun times. Ah well.