Tim and Tola discuss the 2019 film "Ad Astra." Director James Gray said that this was going to be the most accurate portrayal of spaceflight ever put in a movie. Did he succeed? No. No he did not. Yet we found this film's scientific failures were actually overshadowed by its artistic failures. But along the way we had a lot of fun discussing the fetishization of human spaceflight, historical spacesuits and visual motifs, HALO jumps, what would really happen if we were ever hit by a gamma ray burst, the durability of modern aircraft, how gravity and acceleration work, why there are basically two kinds of rockets, and how we're hoping "exploding the monkey" becomes the new "nuking the fridge." Along the way we share a number of hard-learned aerospace truths, such as: a flame trench turns out to be a trench for flame, hot stuff comes out of the end of a rocket, and you try to keep the poison on the *outside* of the crew capsule. As usual, there are lots of spoilers for the film being discussed, but we try to stay away from spoilers for other films.
Final score: Science 30%, Fiction 25%, Film 78%.