YOUNG SCIETIST / 1 / APRIL 2018
EVERLASTING NEED OF… ACCELERATION IN SPACE!? Another rather strange phenomenon occurring in the film are spacecraft’s drives always enabled. It is a total fiction, because in a vacuum, even the smallest impulse is enough to give the given body the speed. How small force is enough to set a body in motion, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg showed aboard the International Space Station in 2013. She used a single strand of her own hair to propel herself, tumbling slowly backward after pushing off handrail on the orbiting lab. A similar mistake also occurs in the scene from the „Gravity” from 2013, and the “Mission to Mars” in 2000, in which the astronaut has too little fuel in his jetpack to get to the second astronaut. This is absurd, because only one small impulse would be enough to put the astronaut in motion. Also in “Gravity” movie, in the famous “rope scene”, where the rope is held by astronauts, minimum force would be sufficient to draw the second astronaut. But he would survive, and the whole story 08
would drastically change.