Despite the fact that i have been studying space travel, exploration and survival for the better part of three decades, I realized today that there are many things I did not know, and could only have learned from watching the movie Mission to Mars, Staring such powerhouse actors as Gary Sinise and Tim Robbins. Here is a sampling of those things that my status as an amateur rocket scientist, astronomer and overall space junkie have rendered me unable to figure out.
- When a person is moving in zero-gravity – or if your are i any way scientifically minded, micro gravity – environment, it does not look any way like the movement shown on such unbelievable and obviously incorrect sources as, say, the news, orNASAtv. Nope, it consists of herky-jerky motions that, while allowing a person to glide through the air, does so in a way that makes them look like they are running an invisible obstacle course. Indeed, their motions look as if they are revoking completely laws of angular motion; instead of traveling in a straight line like Newton says we must, they stumble around the cabin of their spaceship like a drunken hipster dancing down the street to whatever music it is that makes them feel so very, very much.
- Space station design is way ahead of those same sources from above let us know. Not only is it capable of creating a massive space station in mid-earth orbit that doesn’t look like my little cousin made it with his erector set and giving it an earth-gravity environment via the use of a wheel – a design that harkens back to the sixties – it is capable of doing so in the exact opposite way that science dictates. Instead of walking along the outside of the wheel, where centripetal force would create the feeling of gravity, people actually walk along the inside, allowing the hallways in the images to slope gracefully away from the camera and spitting directly in the eye of high-school physics.
- If a spacecraft that is destined to go to Mars was built in orbit, it would be made of titanium. Titanium is one of the hardest, lightest metals that we can make right now. None of this matter when placed against the hardness of glass. A rock flying through space at thousands and thousands of miles per hour that can blast through a titanium wall, a mans hand, and a composite helmet can apparently be stopped cold by a simple piece of class in the middle of the spacecraft.
-A large chunk of hydrogen ice, extruded from pipes shattered by those same tiny rocks that glass can stop, will explode dangerously when exposed to rocket exhaust, despite the lack of oxygen in space. This speaks for itself.
- A human being can survive at 10% of the atmosphere level of earth. This can happen if that person is either a) Gary Sinise or b) people are living in some fairy-tale world where a human being that can barely get to the top of MT. Everest – a place with 25% the pressure of sea level – without fluid leaking into their lungs from their tissue due to lack of said pressure can somehow not only survive, but perform complex motor and cognitive functions such as having the presence of mind to realize that Dr. Pepper will show you where a hole in the side of your spaceship is.
-Humans are easily capable of jumping one spacecraft to another. This is easy when each ship is flying at orbital velocity – roughly 8,000 miles per hour – in different directions and over a mile apart. This is like throwing a rock from a bus driving over the Hawthorne Bridge at 50 miles per hour and hitting ahippy on a bike riding at 30 MpH across the Burnside bridge a half-mile away. Trust someone who throws rocks at things all the time, this is no easy task. I guess that’s why they call them Astronauts.
- When conducting a rescue mission that requires you to spend half a year traveling 90 million miles to rescue one person, make sure that you raise the flag before you look around to even see if that person is alive.
- Plants are far stronger than we thought. Everyone knows that they produce O2, but according to this bastion of scientific corectitude, they create enough other gases to not only pressurize a greenhouse against outside interference from the Martian atmosphere, even if its walls are all ripped up and the wind is blasting ow the rows of ferns, but allow people to walk around mars without their helmet on. This conjures images of little jets of gas blasting out of the plants and pushing back the thin and cold air from the outside. Plants are indeed powerful, eh?
- Astronauts are well versed in not only astronauting, but audio engineering, high-level computer programming, genetic engineering and science, mass spectroscopy, botany, robotics and communications. About the only things they aren’t good at, according to this movie, is acting.
- The best way a highly advanced race of aliens from god-knows-where can think of to communicate with a less advanced and patently amateur humanity is to bury a big metal face on mars and hope that we not only find it, but figure out the fact that said aliens put a security device on it that involves a simple puzzle. there is no way that they would come down here and say “Hello, we are from Altair.” Preferably by capturing and probing uneducated rednecks from the deep south.
- Gary Sinise is an alien.

