The release of Gravity got me thinking about astronaut movies. I’ve got some good ones in the hopper, but I want to start with a classic. 1990’s Solar Crisis is notoriously known as one of the worst sci-fi movies ever made. You might think that a film with a $55-million budget that starred Hollywood legends Charlton Heston, Jack Palance, and Peter Boyle would at least be watchable, but your brain has let you down yet again. Even the film’s director, Richard C. Sarafian, was so dissatisfied with the film that he took the credit “Alan Smithee”, a tactic formerly endorsed by the Directors Guild so that a director could not only absolve himself entirely of the final film produced by the studio, but could even deny all involvement with the project. Have a look at some of the other winners credited to Smithee to get an idea of how bad this film is.
In the film’s opening moments, we learn that the Sun is preparing to emit a megaflare that will vaporize the Earth’s atmosphere. In the most startling moment of the whole film, they’re not planning on nuking the Sun to solve the problem! They’re going to hit it with an antimatter bomb that looks like the leftover bits from a SnapTite model kit. You know, in a post-Star Wars world, there’s really no excuse for special effects this poor:
This review is going to be screenshot heavy because I just can’t resist. This movie is streaming on Netflix so you can play along at home.
What immediately leaps to your mind when you see that? For me, it’s “How small is that space station?!?” You see, in the background is the very familiar sight of the Earth as seen from orbit. But most things, including space stations, are in low-Earth orbit, at an altitude of around 400 km. From 7,000 km up the Earth would appear quite a bit smaller in the sky. Therefore this image must be zoomed in quite a bit, and hence the space station itself is tiny. That sphere in the foreground is probably only a couple feet across.
Oh. It’s a giant spaceship. Ok, we’ll have to ignore numbers in this film since the filmmakers clearly did. Speaking of which…
“If this monster sunflare reaches the Mercury orbit, the Earth’s surface would become glass-like. Estimated deaths: 50%. And if this Monster flare reaches the Venus orbit, the Earth’s surface would become magma. Estimated deaths: 90%… And if this megalo flare reaches the Earth, complete destruction.”
The melting point of glass depends a bit on the type of glass you’re talking about, but is somewhere around 1000º C. This is also around the temperature of magma. So presumably if the flare reaches Mercury, the temperature will instantaneously reach 1000º but cool rapidly, whereas if it reaches Venus then the temperature will be sustained at 1000º. And 10% of the people on Earth can still survive?!? I like those odds.
What follows is actually a pretty good description of what causes solar flares, with a decent animation that they presumably blew their whole budget on. The basic plan is to drop an antimatter bomb into the growing region of magnetic instability on the Sun while it’s pointed away from the Earth, hopefully triggering the flare when it’s facing the other way. Of course, flares themselves aren’t the problem. It’s the resulting coronal mass ejections that’ll get ya.
There are some beautiful touches in this movie. Ice crystals float away after a ship departs from a space station. Astronauts have fairly realistic momentum during spacewalks. The computer visualizations of the Sun are stunning as well, especially considering the time the movie was made.
The thing that never gets adequately explained is why they need to get this close to the Sun in order to deploy the bomb:
Y’see folks, gravity is a harsh mistress. It follows an inverse square law, meaning that if you double your distance from an object, the attraction from gravity is 1/4 what it was. Thus the velocity you need to get away from an object also decreases with the square of your distance from it. At, for example, 2 Million km from the Sun, you would need a velocity of ~364 km/s to get away. For comparison, the fastest spacecraft yet built by humans, Voyager 1, is moving at a velocity of around 17 km/s. They’re clearly much closer than 2 Million km, so they must have a heckuva propulsion system!
Not to belabor a point here, but the Sun is big. In my commentary on The Core, I explained in painful detail that numerous large nukes would have no discernible effect on the Earth’s core. The Sun is 1.4 Million km across and has a mass of ~2×10^30 kg. The Earth is less than 1% that diameter and 0.0003% the mass. I know this is an antimatter bomb and not a nuke, but it still easily fits in a small spacecraft. You gotta think it won’t do much, right? Oh all right, since you insist, I’ll do the math. First we need to estimate how much antimatter the ship could be holding. The shuttle could carry ~24,000 kg to low Earth orbit. Producing even a few grams of antimatter is tricky business, and this movie is only set in 2050, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say they could pack the shuttle’s cargo bay with antimatter. To get antimatter to annihilate, you need an equal amount of matter. If you put 48,000 kg through E=mc^2, you get the equivalent 1,000,000 megatons of TNT. As we’ve discussed before, the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs is thought to have released around 100,000,000 megatons of energy, so 1% of that would be not great for humanity but as unnoticeable as a flea to the Sun. In fact, the Sun eats comets all the time with no obvious consequence.
None of that should dissuade you from watching the movie though. If you like over-the-top, so-bad-it’s-good performances, it’s worth watching at least the scenes from this film with Jack Palance and Charlton Heston. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.