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March 11, 2007
Earthstorm
Let me say first that I usually give the Sci-Fi channel a wide berth on what they show, because they have limited budgets to work with and sometimes they have to cut serious corners to make their TV specials. But somethings you just don't have the ability to take liberties with because they are such glaring errors the average 3rd grader is inspired to call you on it. Take this Earthstorm show, perfectly fine Sci-Fi channel fare. Earth is about to be destroyed by pieces of the moon. A dsperate shuttle mission ensues to try and mitigate the damage on the moon and save the planet from imminent destruction. All fine for a Sci-Fi channel plot, broken moon graphics very cool looking, very realistic. So you've got all the things in place for your story.
Now let's discuss the problems. You launch the shuttle in a hurricane. What?? NASA has a 45 mph wind cut off actually since it takes two days to move a shuttle to the pad from the VAB at maximum speed. And they made this move during a hurricane? Hmmmm...a little weak. Let's assume the best that it was sitting on the pad already waiting to launch. They'd still have to load the payload of nuclear bombs into the cargo bay before launch during a hurricane. So assume now that the shuttle was at the most optimized angle of hurricane force winds that it just didn't fall off the launch pad waiting to launch. Launching the shuttle causes it to sway because the engine force is being held back by the launch pad itself waiting for launch, but assuming that the sway occur in a moment of prefect timing with a few second lull at that point in space and time.
So we are launched into space. The part that totally annoys me is the repeat of the footage where the shuttle discharges both the external fuel tank and the booster rockets at the same time. This never happens. Booster rockets expire first and are released and fall back to the Earth to be reused. A few minutes later at an extremely high altitude the external fuel tank is released. Now this piece of information is also critical for another reason. The Shuttle's main engines (the three that are shown running the entire movie) consume fuel at the rate of a swimming pool per second (17,592 gal/min). Which is why they need to external tank. So ask yourself how do you fly to the moon using the main engines when you have no fuel tank to feed them? The nuclear pulse engines make sense as an engine choice. We've only tested nuclear thermal engine, but you run into the carrying along the fuel for power. But those should have been the only engines running, but then we have the problem in the storyline that they ended up with. They needed more fissile materials so had to dump the engines. But they were able to fly home no problem with the Shuttle's main engines. Just doesn't work.
After all that I like the shuttle footage that they used. I believe they are lifted from Armageddon. I love the metallic thermal-protected panels that they used. These are lifted straight from the SSTO program, but once again if I were running a secret government space program, I wouldn't waste a lot of time not developing the SSTO program, but I've lectured on the SSTO notion ad nauseam, so just read it from the past.
Read more over at IMDB.
Posted by Jamison at March 11, 2007 2:30 PM
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