Armageddon

When the NASA space shuttle pilots are being introduced to Harry's men, the female pilot (I do not remember her name) is wearing a flight suit and has her long hair worn down.  This is against military regulations - women's hair must be worn up, or cut above shoulder length when in uniform.

They say the asteroid is the size of Texas (800 miles wide), which is a lot bigger than the largest known asteroid. Not necessarily a mistake, but maybe....

En route to the asteroid, the two space shuttles head to the Russian space station to refuel.  To simulate gravity, the cosmonaut aboard the space station fires a few rockets to put the space station into the spin. How fast does it need to spin to reproduce Earth gravity? Assuming the space station's spoke arms (where the shuttles dock) are about 50 feet long, the answer is 8 revolutions a minute. That makes it impossible to dock - it'd be like trying to drive a car on ice-covered roads into a spinning parking garage. There's another, more fundamental, problem: the artificial gravity points in the wrong direction. Think of spinning rides at the amusement park. The spinning motion creates an artificial gravity, an effective outward-pushing force. On the space station, the spinning would tend to throw the astronauts down the station's spoke arms and back onto the shuttle. Also, the artificial gravity would taper off to nothing at the centre. But the movie's artificial gravity somehow points down, not outward, and appears to work equally well throughout the station.

After they leave the space station, they head to the moon, and then pull a slingshot U-turn with all engines blasting, ostensibly using the moon's gravity, to increase their speed and come up behind the asteroid. Imagine you're in your car approaching a sharp hairpin turn. You floor the accelerator. What happens? You fly off the road.   Same thing here. In the real universe, that manoeuvre would send the spacecraft flying right past the moon and away from the asteroid.

The movie's plot is to drill an 800-foot-deep hole, drop in a nuclear bomb, boom! and the explosion blows the asteroid in two pieces that fly apart in a V-pattern, missing Earth on both sides. Supposedly there's not enough time for the two pieces to spread out and miss Earth. One newscaster says the asteroid passes zero barrier 3 hours, 37 minutes before impact. Multiply that time by the asteroid's 22,000 mph speed. That means zero barrier is 80,000 miles out from Earth. Earth is 8,000 miles wide. Assuming the asteroid is headed toward the bulls-eye middle, that means you have to deflect both halves by half that, or 4,000 miles. At the zero barrier point that means changing the course of the rocks by 2.8 degrees. Doesn't sound too bad, does it? Except Texas is big. Real big. At 800 miles across, it's one-third wider than the largest known asteroid. Something this big is also heavy. Assuming the asteroid is a nice, round, 800-mile-wide sphere and as dense as a typical asteroid, it would weigh about 7 billion trillion pounds. (That's 7, followed by 21 zeros.) Now let's figure out how fast you have to push those two chunks in the up and down directions to make them miss. Simple calculation: 4,000 miles divided by 3 hours, 37 minutes equals 1,106 mph. How much energy is that, blasting two half-Texas-size rocks to just over 1,100 miles per hour? The equivalent of 500 million 10-megaton nuclear bombs. The would-be world rescuers brought along just one bomb. Oops.

There are two crews boarding their spacecraft, called Freedom and Independence. They are mounting a ramp and when on top, there is a guy who directs the two different crews toward their ship: "Independence on the left, Freedom on the right." Although they were shown mounting one single ramp, a few minutes later, when lifting off, the two spacecraft start about half a mile distant to each other.

When people around the world are shown watching the President's address to mankind. there is evidently no change of daytime and people almost everywhere are sitting there in plain daylight, although it should be night according to the world´s time zones.

After the ship crashes on the asteroid and Ben Affleck goes to the cowboy guy and sees that he's dead, you can see the cowboy's eyes moving.

A traditional space blooper: you can't have explosions in space.


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