Oh, interstellar travel—the journey beyond celestial bodies and the infinite sea of stars—an idea that’s had me hooked since childhood. Not for nothing did NASA’s first manned space program carry the name Mercury. Shot through the cosmos in sleek spacecraft, the Mercury astronauts did what the program’s name suggested.
They hurtled through space, but they didn’t really travel beyond low Earth orbit. After Mercury came Gemini, then Apollo, with the unfortunate Skylab serving its purpose to humanity’s space program in the 1970s by happening to be a part of 1970s comic book art. None of these follow-up programs, nor the international ones that came after, put real space travel on the map for the next big “to infinity and beyond” moment that pushed curious minds (and the imaginations of comic book artists) to think about what future space travel would be like—a concept often lacking in true-to-life physics.
Gravity-defying aerial battles and space travel that treats the vacuum of space like a breezy Sunday drive—what is science fiction doing with the facts of interstellar travel? I’ve been wondering this since I first watched Star Wars as a kid. How does space travel in sci-fi land even work?
Why does gravity seem to be something characters can just ignore? Why can’t space itself be the empty void that we know it is? And why do filmmakers keep getting it wrong?
For all you newcomers to the subject, here’s my take on Hollywood visuals, physics ignorance, and a little of my own snark on the whole thing.
The Best of the Blunders and Bloops – “Gotta Go Fast” in Sci-Fi’s Greatest Space Travel Mistakes
Now, let’s look at some of the best (or should I say, “worst”?) space travel blunders that sci-fi filmmakers have given us over the years. And when I say “best” and “worst,” I mean they are both entertaining and nonsensical.
Get ready for a journey through time and space—a journey made without any regard for physics, of course, because traveling through time and space in a sensible fashion isn’t nearly as entertaining. Oh, and the first prime example I’m going to break down? It comes from an animated film, so be ready for some cartoonish things being done to the laws of nature.
Exhibit A: Gravity—When Physics Goes on Holiday
Let’s begin with Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. Don’t get me wrong; I found it visually stunning, and Sandra Bullock’s zero-gravity pirouettes could easily fit right next to a Cirque du Soleil performance. Nothing, however, can rescue this film from the orbit of absurdity it falls into.
For instance, America’s sweetheart and Clooney’s character seem to defy multiple laws of physics while gripping what must surely be the world’s worst-designed space station. Tethered to the station, they’re still on umbilical life support, thanks to mysterious forces that magically allow them to (barely) hang on. I remember watching this in theaters with my cousin, who’s an actual aerospace engineer.
The way he groaned during the scene where Clooney lets go—which is not an option unless you’re on a one-way trip to Earth that just happens to leave you head down and tumbling—almost got us kicked out.
Exhibit B: Interstellar – Physics-Adjacent at Best
The next film up for review is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Now, Nolan deserves a little credit—he did try, at least, to do right by science.
He brought in the famous physicist Kip Thorne as an advisor, which led to some genuinely impressive visualizations of a black hole (kudos, Chris). But then ol’ Kip must have had a talk with Nolan about plotting, and life, and all that; because the film just goes whole-hog into this idea that “love is a dimension” and turns into a big ole slushy melodrama. Don’t even get me started on the whole “time dilation” scene, where they stay on the planet near a black hole for an hour (which is supposedly a REAL theoretical idea) and come back after seven years has passed on Earth.
That’s just a very unsubtle way to hit the viewer over the head with the whole “we’re dealing with some serious theoretical physics here, folks!” idea. And finally, what’s with the ending? Cooper ends up in the Tesseract built by future humans (or maybe aliens, or…
love-powered space wizards?!) and has to figure out how to send a message back to his daughter in the past (the future “of course” for the inhabitants of the tesseract). I watched this with my film club, and we spent three hours arguing about whether the science made any sense. We never reached a consensus, but we did finish two bottles of wine in the process.
Exhibit C: Star Wars – Fast and Furious, the Space Version
The best-known film series about space travel is also the most inaccurate: Star Wars. I realize Star Wars is practically a religion to some people. I’m not here to offer a bow of reverence.
I’m here to dissect the nonsense. Let’s start with hyperdrive. Every sci-fi fan wants to play with the concept of hyperdrive.
But let’s get real. The notion that you can “jump” to light speed, zip across a galaxy in a few moments of time, and kinda sorta stop without being smeared across the universe by the laws of physics? Ridiculous.
When human beings journey into the vast nothingness of space, they must contend with the forces of acceleration and inertia. Pushing hard on the no-longer-there gas pedal, for instance, could lead to the kind of forces that make a person feel as if they are being squished together or stretched out—much like how one’s feet would feel jammed into a shoe that really isn’t their size. Imagine the opposite: with nearly zero inertia in a faster-than-light cosmic Uber, what might those Troopers on the ground feel like as their shuttle zooms past?
Of course, we’re being unfair to physics. The booms of a Death Star explosion aren’t meant to be scientifically accurate; they’re meant to sound cool.
Exhibit D: Armageddon – When Space Rocks Have Gravity (But Only Sometimes)
I think back to one certain disaster, and when I say disaster, I mean Michael Bay’s Armageddon.
I recognize that it’s not technically sci-fi, but the laughable space travel elements make it close enough. There I was, in the theater, ready for the worst, and still somehow surprised. The story?
A bunch of wildcat roughnecks are sent to a) drill into the asteroid, and b) nuke it, to keep it from colliding with our planet. Great story if you ignore every aspect of astrophysics. I genuinely thought about whether to yell at the screen or just leave.
A sequence shows characters leaping from one asteroid to another—Bruce Willis and his crew looking, for all the world, like they’ve just been handed the primo set of physical laws to obey in the world of gravity and friction. They footloose and fancy-free it from one rock to another, with the grand space vacuum serving as an unfair backdrop. Space has no atmosphere, which means no air resistance and, more importantly, no friction (which is, um, kind of what makes “walking” possible).
So, really? Would these characters be in the space vacuums of asteroids if they could pull it off in a movie studio with all that space air? I saw this on a date in college.
My date thought it was thrilling. I thought it was so bad it was good, but not for the reasons the filmmakers intended. We didn’t go on a second date.
Why Hollywood Gets Space So Wrong (And Why We Let Them)
At this point, you may be thinking, “All right, we understand. Science fiction isn’t a physics lecture. But why does it have such a poor track record for accuracy?” The short answer is that there are several reasons, and they range from easy to understand to hard, as well as from looking good on screens to being tedious in real life.
All the reasons combine to tell a story about why space travel in films looks how it does and why it often gets called out for looking wrong. Let’s get right to the point: real space travel is less like Star Trek and more like the absurdist play Waiting for Godot. The vacuum of space is cold, dark, and staggeringly huge.
Traveling to our closest celestial body, the Moon, takes time—somewhere in the neighborhood of three days, with four possible landing sites if you want to keep it in the ballpark of Apollo. The commitment to go to Mars should take at least six years of your life, and while you will be part of an “international event,” don’t expect any bingo nights. Consider 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance—one of the very few films that even skirts the true-to-life physics of space travel.
Kubrick dared to show just how painfully slow it would be to drift through the solar system, and while it’s a masterpiece, I’d wager most people need a strong coffee to stay awake through the quieter scenes. There’s no rapid-fire, lightspeed jumps, no space dogfights, just the stark silence of space. It’s beautiful in its own way, sure, but also a reminder that the cosmos doesn’t care if your audience has a short attention span.
That’s why most science fiction films dress up the ideas of faster-than-light travel in pretty packages and call them warp drives or hyperspace. Compression of space and time for an interstellar journey is rendered with movie magic; the actual journey, should we somehow manage to survive a voyage through a solar system, let alone an entire galaxy, and return to Earth with our adventures in mind—a reality where we’re just driftwood on the ocean of space for years on end—is beyond imagination. No one will buy a ticket for a movie where astronauts are waiting for the next meal.
The space physics problem isn’t just a nuisance; it’s a complete party pooper. Sci-fi loves its frenetic action, and you need something to act against if you want to create a space scene where people are really moving. In the vacuum of space, no one can hear you defuse a bomb or trigger a sonic weapon—thanks for nothing, friction.
But apparently, NASA’s not up for writing the next great American novel, either, since the engineers seem to love the silence and lack of drama that come with the inertia of zero g. I visited the Kennedy Space Center last summer and asked one of the guides about this. He laughed and said, “You know why real astronauts don’t barrel roll in space?
Because they’d throw up in their helmets.”
Space Battles and Artificial Gravity: The Big Lies
The classic trope of space dogfights has spaceships zooming around each other, barrel-rolling and shooting like fighter jets in an aerial battle. “It’s a staple of sci-fi, from Star Wars to Battlestar Galactica,” Jeffrey Kauffman pointed out in a 2004 magazine article. “But in reality, there’s no air in space,” Kauffman continued, “which means no aerodynamic maneuvers and definitely no swooping turns.” Spaceships would move through a vacuum more like chess pieces than like X-wing fighters, gliding along precise trajectories and only changing course through carefully timed thruster burns.
Then there’s artificial gravity. In reality, we haven’t quite mastered that either (shocking, I know). The best that we can do to live in space is the International Space Station, which is a whole lot of room, not zero-G fun.
But spaceships in movies come fitted with gravity like it’s a regular thing. And why not? Searching for the lost cap to a pen is bad enough in Earth-G; it would be worse if we had to do it in space, and zero-G shoe-tying ranks pretty high on the list of why not to do that in a movie.
I remember watching a documentary where astronauts talked about how much time they spend just trying to keep track of things in zero-G. One astronaut said she spent half an hour looking for a pen that had floated away. Not exactly the stuff of blockbusters.
The Humanity Factor: Why Stories Need to Bend Physics
Another factor influencing science fiction’s rule-bending in depictions of space travel is more relatable to us as humans: the need for storytelling to invoke emotion, connection, and a dash of drama. Simply put, filmmakers have to give audiences a narrative where humans matter, and the vastness of space doesn’t really allow for that. We can’t breathe there, for one thing.
But space could serve as a setting for all sorts of stories if it didn’t also ask for a story as emotionless as those told around the campfire after a long day of being pursued by saber-toothed tigers. Examine The Martian. It ranks among the more scientifically sound space films, but it nevertheless takes artistic license to have a good story.
The plot’s inciting incident, the dust storm that threatens the Ares 4 mission and “kills” Mark Watney? It’s a nice idea, but a real Mars dust storm couldn’t threaten a human (Watney is too big to be Dusty!) or a spacecraft. Mars’ atmosphere is too thin for that kind of action.
The story, to be gratifying, needs peril to its principal character—so the filmmakers created some. I had a chance to ask Andy Weir about this at a book signing. He admitted that the dust storm was scientifically inaccurate but said he needed a way to strand Watney that wouldn’t make his crew look incompetent or cruel.
Sometimes storytelling trumps science. Another contender is “Ad Astra,” which attempts to fuse two great themes—space exploration and the father-son relationship—that have long bedeviled filmmakers and, in the case of space exploration, humankind. Pitt’s character confronts his daddy issues against the backdrops of both the solar system and the stunning visual effects for which the film has been praised.
But if humanity’s push into space is to be the stuff of great storytelling, then “Ad Astra” has chosen a poor script upon which to unfurl those effects. You might be asking yourself, “Why is any of this significant? Can’t we just go to our space operas in peace?” And of course, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying some good old-fashioned disbelief for the sake of fun.
But consistently ignoring the actual physics of our solar system and the space beyond it, as postulated through all those great sci-fi novels and movies, can even affect how we understand human potential and the real-world possibilities of going into space. That’s why I have so much respect for movies that at least make an attempt to be authentic. They might not have the same kind of glitz and glamor that other science fiction films have, but they at least try to portray what “real” science in “real” conditions might look like.
Think of the scene in Apollo 13 where they are valiantly trying to fix carbon dioxide filters in the command module. The danger is real; the human lives on the line are inarguably at risk. The portrayal is unsettling because drowning in one’s own CO2 when a human is only supposed to be able to hold their breath for 30 seconds is not dramatic because it looks good.
It’s dramatic because it could actually happen—and did. At the end of the day, science fiction is not about getting everything correct; it is about the “what if,” exploring wonders, and imagining circumstances that are beyond our comprehension or capability. It is about dreaming, and sometimes a chemistry expert has to suspend disbelief when watching a Wellsian narrative unfold because the situations portrayed are utterly unrealistic—biologically or chemically impossible.
And yet one also has to admire the ambition and dreams of the makers of such narratives, who push the envelope in exploring new realms and dimensions of human experience. And if they dream up a situation involving time travel or a Laplace demon, and the chemistry involved is one-hundred-percent crackpot, well, what price imagination? I’ll still be there on opening night, popcorn in hand, ready to enjoy the ride—even if that ride violates every law of physics we know.
