Which movies and shows ace their depiction of crewed spaceflight? Also, which science fiction spacecraft are the most realistic?
If you can accept the existence of an engine and fuel source efficient enough to accelerate a ship to .92 of c, Project Hail Mary does a pretty good job of sticking to hard science.
Apollo 13 used real weightlessness!
I posted this five years ago in another thread. According to our good friend “Harpo,” the reason it’s so accurate is that Fritz Lang got his info from Hermann Oberth.
More from ‘Die Frau im Mond:’
They said they would need to accelerate to 11,200 meters/second, which is escape velocity. (OK, that’s just math, but it was still impressive to have that detail in a movie of that time.)
They used a multi-stage rocket.
They wanted to limit the rocket to 4Gs of acceleration, which is pretty much what the Saturn V astronauts endured.
Weightlessness in space (although I think they missed the reason as to ‘why’ they were weightless).
They used a figure-8 trajectory, which is what the Saturn V rockets used. (Yeah, technically it’s not actually a ‘figure 8,’ but that’s the easiest way to show in on a chalkboard.)
Retro rockets to slow down the rocket for landing.
Although they did miss some factual stuff like the Moon having a breathable atmosphere, and hills full of gold.
The Vomit Comet! 
2001 was pretty good with it.
Apollo 13 was really good, especially the launch sequence. I can watch that over and over.
Gravity was pretty realistic too.
It is not a movie, but the anime series “PLANETES” has pretty good orbital mechanics, realistic ships, and a compelling storyline. What’s not to love?
Highly recommended, really.
Moved to Cafe society, since this is about movies and shows.
It did indeed seem pretty good in that respect (and just a good film all round), but there was one bit that (with my lay person knowledge of physics) was a bit silly (minor spoiler): -
A character is ‘hanging on’ to some rope/lengthy debris (I forget exactly what). They have essentially halted their relative motion compared to everything else and yet if they let go they will ‘fall’ off into the distance. I never understood that bit and I don’t know if it’s just a goof or I am missing something obvious)
While definitely dated, Destination Moon and Forbidden Planet are still quite good.
They were being dragged down by the weight of the plot.
My vote is for, “Gravity”, with Sandra Bullock. The one scene I thought was really off was when she herself was tethered, and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) was tethered to her. He exhorted her to cut the tethering rope connecting the two of them because there was no hope of saving him. Since she herself was being held in a stabile tether, all she had to do was give him a good tug to get him moving towards her. That makes 2 votes for “Gravity”.
Marooned (1969) was fairly accurate, especially for its time.
You mean Space Travelers? 
I don’t remember the scene in question (nor do I think your description is a spoiler), but I think I would have noticed something like this. I suspect that the character in question had not halted their relative motion to the object in question, or that the object itself was accelerating (or decelerating). As I recall, they were all in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and could have been experiencing differential atmospheric friction.
Not the most realistic, but the spaceship in Red Planet had counter rotating rings(?) which is a nice touch – artificial gravity and torque balacing.
Brian
For my money, 2001: A Space Odyssey is overall the best. It was the first mob=vie that made a point of showing spacecraft moving the way they ought to in space, rather than swooping and gliding in arcs like atmospheric ships. (the Shuttle gives the impression of swooping – but that’s the camera moving around it. If you watch the way the ship moves, it’s following Newton’s laws). The pods move in short straight paths, and rotate about their centers of mass, starting and stopping abruptly. It looks fake, until you watch footage of actual spacecraft in motion, which do the same things. Watch the 1989 documentary For All Mankind to see what I mean. It’s the most realistic depiction of spacecraft in flight because it really IS footage of spacecraft in flight.
I give 2010: The Year we Make Contact credit, too, although they insisted on putting too much noise into space – In Space No One Can Hear Your Engines. The "braking maneuver around Jupiter was credible. And I like the way they find the abandoned Discovery flipping end over end. If the bearings in the artificial gravity section had seized up, it would make sense that it’d transmit the angular momentum to the craft as a whole and have that result.
As for 1950s movies, it’s hard to tell. Heinlein acted as technical advisor for both Destination Moon and Operation Moonbase, which did some interestin g things with spacecraft (I especially like the gravity-free meeting aboard the space station). Conquest of Space was made by George Pal without Heinlein, but my main recollection was how bad the ships looked. Arthur C. Clarke is on record as criticizing the launch track used in When Worlds Collide. I think It! The Terror from Beyond Space was OK as far as spacev travel goes, except that there was too much gravity in the ship. I could buy it if they were accelerating, but they weren’t.
Disney made three TV shows about space travel in the 1950s, with technical guidance from Werner von Braun, Willy Ley, and that crowd, and their depictions appear very plausible – “Man in Space”, “Man and the Moon”, and “Mars and Beyond”. They’re available on DVD (and, although originally broadcast in black and white, were filmed in color)
Mor recent movies have tried to be more accurate as regards trajectories of craft and the absence of gravity, so things like Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary tend to be pretty good. I liked the accuracy of The Expanse series. But there are plenty of more popular things (the whole “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” franchises, for instance) that don’t even try to be accurate.
I really would like to see someone do a movie or TV show set on the Moon that actually tried to depict the low gravity. I don’t think anyone’s ever done this, except for a few seconds of levity (afte which they ignore the whole thing). Not even Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 tried to show this accurately in the scenes set on the moon.
Yeah, I know it’s difficult. But with appropriate staging and acting, some wrire work, and computer-aided effects it ought now to be possible to do so. I wanna see The Moon is a Harsh Mistress done right.
Not to be confused with the modern streaming series For All Mankind, where the spaceflight is pathetic.
Me, too!
It’s also bugged me for awhile that Bowman and Poole, when they’re not in the artificial-gravity habitat ring of Discovery, still seem to be under gravity and not in zero-G, particularly in the pod bay scenes.
Politely, did we watch the same film? They use a MMU to transfer between the Hubble orbit and the ISS. It doesn’t have anywhere enough fuel and they couldn’t do it by instinct. They’d need navigation help. It’s the equivalent of them using a trolling motor on their boat off the coast of the US to rendezvous with a ocean liner in the Azores. It’s completely ridiculous. You couldn’t even do it with the Shuttle. Space is big, even in low earth orbit.