Space movies films nasa

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Here are the best and worst space movies, according to NASA astronaut

Here are the best- and worst-rated space movies from ‘Interstellar’ and ‘The Martian’ to ‘Apollo 13’ and ‘Gravity’.

Space movies films nasa

Image via Adobe Stock

Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut, gave his honest opinion about some of the most popular space movies to come out of Hollywood. Keep reading, your favourite might just be on his ‘worst-rated list.

It’s a wonderful time to be alive. We’re living in a time in our evolution where we can send robots to other planets for exploration. But it’s okay to indulge in some faulty science fiction from time to time.

NASA-approved space movies

Apollo 13 (based on a real NASA mission)

Apollo 13 is at the top of Reisman’s list, scoring a cool 10/10 rating. The events of the movie really happened, and the cast did a superb job of bringing it to life. Reisman says Apollo 13 is “the gold standard”.

“They got it right more than probably any other movie ever made about space. This movie is the closest thing to being a documentary without actually taking cameras up and filming it in space”.

He explained that the cast of Apollo 13 – starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon and Ed Harris – even used actual dialogue from the real mission, based on NASA’s recordings of the transmissions.

“They had transcripts of what actually happened during the real Apollo 13 […] And so what you see in that movie is 100% real”.

Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut.

2001: A Space Odyssey

In the second spot is 2001: A Space Odyssey. With a Reisman Rating of 9/10, it’s one of his “all-time favourite space films”. He praises the film’s realism, despite it being filmed before Apollo 11, or before humans landed on the moon.

“And the science in the movie holds up tremendously well. The one thing that’s missing there, and in the opening scene there, is the atmosphere. You just see the blue Earth and then suddenly the black space.”

Reisman explains that, in reality, “there’s a thin blue line that separates the sunlit Earth from the blackness of space”. He also lauded the films depicting of creating artificial gravity.

The lack of gravity in spaces causes “all kind of funky and not-so-good things to happen” to human bodies, so astronauts fight it by working out for two hours a day. But, hey, what if we can create artificial gravity, Reisman asks.

“By spinning [the space station] like that, you can create centrifugal force that acts and feels like artificial gravity. If you’re creating artificial gravity with a small radius, you can handle that spinning for a couple of minutes”.

Interstellar

Interstellar is his third favourite with a rating of 8/10, which Reisman’s describes as “pretty trippy”. Nobody knows what happens inside because nothing ever escapes a black hole.

“If a person went inside a black hole, what would it really be like? Who knows? But you do see the light bending in there, and it is true that light will bend when it’s exposed to very strong gravitational fields. A lot of the stuff that they did in this movie, they tried to be as realistic as possible”.

However, Reisman has a problem with the “bookshelf tesseract thing”. You might familiar with the scene. Some advanced civilisation created this tesseract for communicating with people in other dimensions.

He feels that the scene might have been “overly complicated. But other than that, “they got a lot of stuff right, especially about the relativistic effects in the movie”.

“If you’re a super-advanced alien intelligence that can build a bookshelf tesseract thing to go across dimensions, why can’t you put in a phone? Or at least put in, like, a whiteboard, right? With a dry-erase marker that you could just spell, like, “Hey! Stay away from the black hole!”

Star Trek Into Darkness

Star Trek Into Darkness received a rating of 7 out of 10 from Reisman, and he had a cool story about the degrading gravity plate and decided not to “knock ‘Star Trek’ down for its depiction of artificial gravity”.

Reisman explains that astronauts on the space station can choose to talk to celebrities “as kind of a morale boost”. Reisman wanted to talk to Ron Moore and David Eick, the creators of Battlestar Galactica.

“We had this video teleconference, and I said to them, ‘You know, you did the same thing. You come up with this artificial gravity on Galactica. Everybody’s just walking around like they’re on Earth, but you’re out in the middle of space. Where’s the gravity coming from? Why do you have to do that? Like, why would you take away one of the coolest things about being up here, the ability to fly?’ And Ron Moore said to me, he said, ‘Garrett… You have any idea how expensive those special effects are and all those stunts?’ So I’m not gonna knock “Star Trek” down”.

Now for the worst….

The worst space movies

The Martian (not based on a real NASA mission)

Reisman gives The Martian a 3 out of 10. I’m not going to lie, this one hurt me personally. While the film has been praised for a “very real depiction of science”, it still gets some stuff horribly wrong.

“This whole idea about puncturing your glove to fly like Iron Man and be rescued by your spaceship. Yeah, not so much. We have a jet pack that we wear when we do spacewalks on the space station”.

While the Iron Man scene is “bogus, big-time bogus” according to Reisman, he says “the rest of the movie was up, like, a nine; the rest of the movie was really, really good”.

Guardians of the Galaxy

Look, I know Guardians is not meant to be “real”, but this hurt me too. While the science was a bit off, Reisman does say that any movie with a talking raccoon is OK in his book. He has a big issue with Starman’s suit.

“It’s great that he’s got this mask on so he can breathe in space, but what about the rest of his body? The rest of your body is gonna be in really, really bad shape. The fluids inside your tissues are gonna vaporise, and so basically, your blood is gonna boil, all the water in your tissue is gonna turn into gas. He takes off his helmet to try to save his friend there, somehow holds his breath”.

Reisman explains that a human “can survive for very brief periods of time while exposed to a vacuum, it has been done. However, said human is going to be worried about “barotrauma”.

“So, what that means is that there’s gas inside your body, in your lungs, in your sinuses, and that’s gonna start expanding once you get exposed to a vacuum, ’cause now, instead of having the outside air pressure to work against, now there’s nothing out here. It’s gonna want to blow up like a balloon. Then you worry about decompression sickness, where all the nitrogen comes out of the solution in your blood, what scuba divers can get when they spend too much time at depth and come up too quickly. They call it “the bends” ’cause you bend over in pain at all your joints where the bubbles build up. So all that would happen to Star-Lord even before he takes off his mask”.

It seems that Rocket is the film’s saving grace. Reisman concludes: “Having said that, did I mention that this movie has a talking raccoon? You’re worried about the helmet? I mean, it’s got a talking raccoon”.

He seems to really like the racoon. Guardians of the Galaxy gets a 2.5 out of 10.

Gravity

Reisman said he heard space debris knock into the space station during his time there. The way in which the film depicts space debris is not accurate, because you can “see it coming in the movie”.

“They see this, like, a cloud of debris coming from thousands of kilometres away. That’s bogus, OK? This stuff is travelling an order of magnitude like 10 times faster than a rifle bullet. You can’t look at a shooting range and see a rifle bullet flying around from thousands of kilometres away. You’re not gonna see this stuff coming”.

He also says it’s “completely unrealistic” that George Clooney is flying on by, and Sandra Bullock reaches and grabs his tether and grabs onto him. That would be hard, because, with his momentum, he would “carry her away”.

Gravity gets a Reisman rating of 2 out of 10, making it the worst of the worst, rivalled only be Spaceballs.

Also read: NASA’s Perseverance rover officially ready to search for life on Mars