The Science of Interstellar [video]

The inconsistency introduced by the magic shuttle craft ruined the movie for me. Using retouched Saturn V footage for the first take off is such a huge bait and switch.

Worse, the technology implied by the shuttle craft damages the entire premise of the movie. If they have that kind of power source and propulsion, they could build a huge orbital infrastructure, not just the one ship. A significant portion of Earths population could emigrate. They could build huge arcologies on the Earth.

And that was just the first problematic thing with the movie. The level of life support, the magic solar panel plane, and so on.

> E.g. how they need massive amounts of fuel to get off from earth, but just use their tiny craft to launch twice into orbit from the two planets they visit

The explanation for this is so obvious I'm surprised more people don't see it.

When they left earth, they used external fuel tanks so they didn't burn the fuel in the two craft. That way, when they left Earth orbit the tanks of the two tiny craft were still full, to be used later in the mission.

If they didn't use the external tanks, they could have still left earth (as they left other planets with the little craft), but they would have been heading off without full fuel tanks, which were obviously precious as running low was a mission concern.

I thought the explanation of how the Blight was going to render Earth's atmosphere unbreathable was sort of unbelievable. The Blight's metabolism excretes or produces nitrogen gas at such a high rate that the percentages of the atmosphere's constituent elements are going to change drastically within a single generation? (c.f. the scientist saying that the last people to starve would be the first to suffocate.) Is that even possible? I mean, we burn fossil fuels and emit CO2 like the dickens, but nobody is arguing that we're going to die of CO2 poisoning instead of being threatened by global warming.

Also, near the beginning, the ersatz Predator was supposedly solar powered (hence being in the air autonomously for ten years), but when it lands it's just a metal plane.

I may have misunderstood this aspect of the movie, but it seemed to me that the government was determined to convince the public that space exploration, and NASA, were excesses of the past to be avoided. The spacecraft they asked Cooper to pilot was a type of craft that crashed during his testing of the ship, prior to the public (and false) shutdown of space spending.

If this ship had the capability to repeatedly leave planets without the rockets shown in the beginning, would they have been able to reveal that to the public? The rockets could have been used for the launch from earth to avoid making that disclosure to the public.

Also, it seems like another possibility is that it was simply done to conserve fuel. Maybe the small spacecraft was capable of holding enough fuel for the 3-5 launches shown, but no more? If it wasn’t capable of holding additional fuel that might be needed for the mission, the extra rockets for an initial launch seem like a fair idea, even if they were very expensive.

I don't know anything about this, so I could be very wrong, but to me it seems like there are some plausible explanations.

> how they need massive amounts of fuel to get off from earth

I don't think this is the case. Consider the flight that 'Coop' keeps dreaming about at the start of the movie. Seems he was piloting one of the shuttles into Earth orbit but encountered an anomaly which messed things up.

Kip Thorne says that much tough "frozen clouds" were violation of physics.

Can you share what things it gets wrong? I have been trying to look that up even since I watched the movie, but can't find anything useful.

Given their motivation, which is to promote the movie and the book, I'm skeptical that this is a real discovery and not just something visualized that was previously in a mathematical form.

If this is a real breakthrough, then where is the paper?