The movie Gravity will sure keep you glued to your seats. James Cameron called it the realest space movie yet. The whole film captures all your fears about what would happen if you had just drift out into space. But according to real life astronaut Michael Massimino, the movie's got a lot of gaping holes in it.
There's some spoilers below, that kind of uses science to ruin the realness of it all. Thread carefully!
Massimino has worked on missions repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, and if you think a jetpack is going to save you if you float away, then you're wrong. It isn't just impossible for jetpacks, but impossible for space shuttles too:
As we recall from bitter memory, the Hubble and the space station are in vastly different orbits. Getting from one to the other requires so much energy that not even space shuttles had enough fuel to do it. The telescope is 353 miles high, in an orbit that keeps it near the Equator; the space station is about 100 miles lower, in an orbit that takes it far north, over Russia.
To have the movie astronauts Matt Kowalski (Mr. Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Ms. Bullock) zip over to the space station would be like having a pirate tossed overboard in the Caribbean swim to London.
[
NYTimes]
Check out the trailer below: