*GRAVITY* is super tense! | First Time Watching Reaction 

"We're going back to the shuttle. How's that for a plan? Copy?" "Fuck!" "Right, copy that." Fun Fact: The film is second only to Cabaret (1972) to receive the most Academy Awards without winning Best Picture. Wish You Were Here Award Fact: While filming an aquatic scene, Alfonso Cuarón held his breath along with Sandra Bullock to make sure he wasn't asking too much of her. He soon found he couldn't match her lung capacity. What Script Fact: Ryan's (Sandra Bullock) hallucination of seeing Kowalski again in the space pod was George Clooney's idea. According to Clooney, Alfonso Cuarón was unable to come up with a satisfactory resolution for the character despite many revisions of the scene, including removing the dialogue, until Clooney offered to take a shot at rewriting the scene himself. Kessler Syndrome Fact: The film's cascade of debris is a very real possibility. This scenario is known as the Kessler Syndrome, named after NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler who first proposed the theory in 1978. A cascading Kessler Syndrome involving an object the size of the International Space Station would trigger a catastrophic chain-reaction of debris. The orbiting debris field would make it impossible to launch space exploration missions or satellites for many decades.

This is a fun movie despite the science errors. First, the Soyuz spacecraft do not have side access hatches on the descent/control modules. Only the training mockups have these hatches for ease of ingress/egress. On the pad, crews enter the space worthy Soyuz by a hatch in the fairing, and the hatch on the orbital module. They then climb down into the descent/control module. The Chinese Shenzhou is essentially a copy of the Soyuz, with the exception of the orbital modules which are cylindrical instead of spheroid. They do not have side hatches on the descent/control modules either. Egress after landing is made through the top hatch that used to connect to the orbital module. Astronauts, after a year on ISS, need help getting out and are placed in carrier chairs to be taken for rehab. Coming back to gravity after a year is extremely exhausting and requires some physical therapy to regain strength. You’d be amazed how much weight you live your life under, until you go up there and it’s all gone. That’s why ISS needs a rotating section for simulated gravity. Also, you can survive short exposures to the vacuum of space. If you close your eyes tightly, and blow all the air out of your lungs so it can’t expand and rupture your lungs, you could survive up to 20 seconds before unconsciousness, and another 10 to 30 seconds before death. You’d have burst capillaries in your skin, and might also get frostbite on your ears, nose, anything exposed. You won’t immediately freeze as some science fiction has indicated. There’s two ways you lose heat, convection (heat carried away by a carrier, like atmospheric gases,) and radiation (infrared radiation traveling away from you without a carrier.) In a vacuum, or extremely tenuous atmosphere, convection is not possible, so radiation is how you lose heat, and radiation is much less efficient than convection. So your heat loss in a vacuum is fairly slow. You’d suffocate, and have gases form bubbles in your blood, long before freezing to death. They made mistakes in orbits. The Hubble telescope is in an equatorial orbit at around 326 miles altitude, in low Earth orbit. The ISS is on a 50 degree SW to NW orbit at 250 miles altitude, in LEO. Tiangong is on a 40 degree inclination, at roughly around the same altitude. To say that you could travel from one orbit and inclination to another without a fully functional spacecraft, is childish thinking. Orbital altitudes and inclinations have to be adjusted over several orbits, using thrust inputs from orbital maneuvering system thrusters. You can not just go from an equatorial orbit to a 50 degree orbit with a jet pack. Spy and communication satellites are in high orbits, usually geosynchronous or geostationary orbits. To say that the destruction of a spy sat created a cloud of debris that came down to low Earth orbit is a considerable stretch. Satellite comm’s may have been lost, because comm sats are close to similar orbits as spy sats, but Houston would have had ground comm stations that could have at least talked to Ryan and Kowalski, though Houston may not have been able to hear them talking back. Just a fact, but low Earth orbit is full of debris ranging from paint chips all the way up to upper rocket stages. Space agencies are constantly tracking as much space junk as they can to ensure the safety of astronauts. EVA/spacewalks are dangerous always. If Explorer had been breached by debris, there would not be crew and items floating around inside, they would have been blown out into space with explosive decompression. Also, the heat shields on the Soyuz/Shenzhou do not detach as shown in the movie. The main heat shield, and window shields, only detach after the module is hanging from the parachutes. After the module has slowed enough that the parachute reefing cords are cut, and the chutes fully expand, then the heat shields fall away. Then the module vents any remaining high test peroxide from the maneuvering system, the seats pop up a few inches in preparation for landing, and then at 3 meters AGL, the soft landing jets fire, and the seats drop on touchdown to soften the impact. Nice reaction!

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