Corrected entry: When the ship first launches, they switch on the headlights. They use a special device to see outside the ship, and the ship has no windows, so why does the ship have lights?
Vader47000
7th May 2005
The Core (2003)
24th Nov 2002
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Corrected entry: As the Pan-Am shuttle is approaching the spinning space station there as a shot of it from within the hub based dock. The star filled background is spinning as it ought to, but the shuttle, which is not yet centered on the dock, is seen swinging across the sky independent of the background. To do this the craft would be tracing a spiral through space.
Correction: We see it comes from one side, swinging across to the other as it tries to line up directly in front of the target. This is like driving a car from across three lanes of traffic to tailgate a truck - you will likely swerve a little too far and have to correct your position once or twice. In 3 dimensions, plus a 4th dimension of moving space as they orbit the moon, this becomes triply difficult to do. So yes, they'd be tracing a spiral, but take a soda can and spin it while flipping it end-over-end, and visualize how the opening tab moves through space - a 3-D spiral.
The shuttle would be tracing the spiral from the point of view of the station's docking bay, with the eccentricity of the spiral declining as it got closer until it were aligned with the docking bay. The point in the original post is not that the ship wouldn't be in a spiral from the POV of the station, it's that in order to appear flying in a straight line independent of the background from the station POV, the ship would have to be flying in an erratic corkscrew flight path that precisely matched the rotation of the backdrop of the stars. This is unlikely. The shuttle would simply need to rotate along its central axis to match the station's rotation until it docked. In the truck analogy, from the POV of the truck the swerving car would appear to be driving erratically, not in the straight line that would be analogous to the shuttle's approach.
19th Jul 2010
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Corrected entry: In the scene where we see the Moonbus landing at the Tycho Excavation Base, its descent engines raise dust that billows rather than falling in an arc straight back to the ground as would normally be the case in a vacuum. (00:50:35)
Correction: Previously posted and corrected. This is an accepted film technique, not a mistake. You cannot film in a vacuum.
Vacuum chambers certainly existed at the time. NASA tested Apollo spacecraft in them. It may have been difficult, but it certainly would have been feasible to film models in a vacuum at the time. Further, why should an "accepted film technique" forgive an obvious mistake in physics. If anything, it would be an intentional mistake if there was no way to simulate the effect of dust in a vacuum.
Correction: Dust particles will billow out in the manner we see if they have gas molecules to bounce off. Normally on the moon they have no such thing but in this case they do - the exhaust plume of the landing spacecraft. Until it slowly dissipates it will react with the dust molecules just like an atmosphere does.
12th Aug 2005
Apollo 13 (1995)
Corrected entry: When Jim Lovell rips off his biomedical sensors, he says "I am sick and tired of the entire Western world knowing how my kidneys are functioning." The biomedical sensors don't measure kidney function, only breathing and heartbeat.
Correction: Lovell is just expressing his anger, this is a character mistake, not a movie mistake.
It's not even a character mistake. Lovell is simply using hyperbole to express his frustration over feeling micromanaged.
3rd Sep 2007
Apollo 13 (1995)
Corrected entry: When the astronauts are preparing to dock with the Lunar Module, one of the people in Mission Control says, "If Swigert can't dock this thing, we don't have a mission." In fact, all three crew members were trained to peform the LEM docking, and had Swigert run into any trouble, Lovell or Haise could easily have done the procedure instead. This is confirmed in the DVD commentary.
Correction: Presumably Swigert is the best trained since this is his primary task, it's a reasonable, if not necessarily correct, remark to assume that if he can't do it then nobody can.
Someone in mission control says it in a voiceover that seems like it was added for exposition to build tension for the audience related to the "Jack is new to the mission" subplot. The idea that someone in mission control would be unaware of the cross-training of the astronauts to handle each others' tasks in an emergency is a dubious claim at best. And Lovell had served as the CMP on Apollo 8 (which admittedly didn't have a LM to dock with, but he was certainly familiar with how to fly and dock the craft).
19th Aug 2007
Apollo 13 (1995)
Corrected entry: The scene showing the astronauts thrust towards the forward panels, and then violently back into their 'couches' is meant to show the massive thrust from the ascent and second stage engines. In fact, this sequence is inaccurate: The earlier Mercury and Gemini rockets did indeed create this massive 10 to 15-G load momentarily upon the astronauts, but the Saturn V did no such thing. The Saturn V never exceeded more than 2 Gs during any portion of lift off or ascent, and was in fact referred to as the "old man's rocket" by astronauts in reference to its relatively mild G-loads during flight.
Correction: This actually happened with the Apollo 13 mission. It wasn't supposed to, hence Swigert's sarcastic comment about "some little jolt", but a slight mistiming in the engine firing caused it.
I think the point of the entry is that Lovell tells them to expect the jolt, implying that it was a feature of a Saturn V launch and that Lovell would be aware of it since he had experienced a Saturn V launch before, with Apollo 8. The scene as written is meant, then, to demonstrate Lovell's experience in spaceflight, even though the jolt would have been a surprise to him too.
2nd Mar 2014
Apollo 13 (1995)
Corrected entry: In the scenes where all three astronauts are wearing their space suits, they all have a red collar on the helmet and red markings on suits. The LEM pilot (in this case Fred Haise) would have blue markings and a blue collar so that Houston (and others) could distinguish between the Commander and the LEM pilot when they were on the moon.
Correction: The colours of the suit collars are in fact, correct. The difference in colour on previous flights was not to tell them apart from Houston (impossible with the black and white camera on Apollo 11). It was so the ground crew could tell the difference between an A7L (original / blue colour) and an A7Lb (upgraded / red colour) suit. The vent ports in the helmet wouldn't line up if the two styles of suits were mixed, so they changed the colour of the components to avoid that problem. By Apollo 13 astronauts only used A7Lb suits with red collars.
In addition, it was Lovell's suit that has red stripes on it (seen in the moonwalk daydream sequence) to distinguish between it and Haise when they would be on the moon. Apollo 11 and 12 suits had no such markings, so distinguishing between the astronauts was difficult, leading to the addition of the red stripes on the commander's suit.
4th Jan 2016
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
Corrected entry: While at Maz's castle, Finn's blaster suddenly goes missing. He had it when Maz gives him the lightsaber, but once he comes out of the castle it is gone. He even tells Maz that he needs a weapon. She reminds him about the saber. He has the blaster when he gets to the Resistance base.
Correction: There's really nothing sudden about it. Finn has the blaster while in the castle's basement with Han and Chewie, when Maz hands him the lightsaber, but then the First Order's attack rocks Maz's castle. After this we have no idea what transpires while they're all inside the castle, and quite a bit of time passes until we see Han, Chewie, Finn, and Maz climb out of the castle rubble, which is when Finn no longer has that weapon. And Finn does not have a blaster with him as he exits the Falcon, when they get to the Resistance base.
We do know what transpires when they're in the castle. According to deleted scenes and the novelization, Stormtroopers capture them and force Finn to drop his gun. Then Han begins to insult Snoke and the First Order (revealing he noticed Finn was wearing Stormtrooper boots and that's how he knew he was lying about who he was) and Maz uses the Force to collapse the corridor on the troopers, allowing them to escape. But Finn left the blaster behind.
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Correction: Because the ship uses cameras, and the cameras probably use visible light to function. They were first entering water and you can see the light projected from the headlights light up the water around them and on their screens, that light is what the cameras pick up.
The lights and cameras aren't going to be made from unobtainium, so they'd melt not long after the mission starts, and provide a point of vulnerability for the magma to enter the ship.
Vader47000