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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I devoured every word of that article with baited breath. One of the most amazing stories of fiction intertwined with actual events I've ever read.

I wonder how much years will have to pass before it would be acceptable to make this fictional rescue mission into a movie..?

The obvious issue would be everyone walking out of the theater saying "Jeezz, NASA should have obviously done that, idiots. They killed those astronauts because they didn't do that."

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Movies can be a catalyst for good.

The movie Marooned (1969) depicted a Soviet spacecraft rendezvousing with a stricken American spacecraft to deliver oxygen via an EVA. However, it was unable to dock.

This movie was circulating right around the time of the Apollo 13 mission. The movie was shown to Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, who approached the Soviets about a common docking system. The result was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the APAS androgynous docking system.

See: http://archive.is/zgGEK

Read Voyage and Titan from Stephen Baxter. He was an astronaut candidate and write two great books about NASA.

Of course, the thousands of scenarios where something goes horribly wrong all make for terrible movies.

Yeah, but that wouldn't be the movie. Obviously it could focus on them and have many, many narrow misses, but we all know it would still have the Hollywood ending.

Yeah. A movie like that might only get ten Academy Award nominations.

http://gravitymovie.warnerbros.com/

The girl made it home (despite being like the worst astronaut ever) so it still counts as a happy ending.

The article for me pointed out just how unlikely the entire movie is. I already knew there were a lot of impossibilities in Gravity (changing orbital planes etc) - but reading just how much work it takes to keep two orbiters aligned, and how much work it is to get into and out of a spacesuit. In the movie she gets out of one space suit and then into another, and then out of it again. That right there is impossible from the reading.

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