Former NASA Astronaut Rates 9 More Space Scenes In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- Retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott watches and rates the realism of how outer space is portrayed in movies.
Stott breaks down what would actually happen if you went outside in space without a helmet, as seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3," starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, and Bradley Cooper. She details what went wrong with the Apollo 13 mission's lunar module and how the crew returned to Earth in "Apollo 13," starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton. She discusses how fires spread in microgravity in "Gravity," starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. She explains the challenges of docking to a space station in "Interstellar," starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Matt Damon. She talks about how lunar rovers work in "Ad Astra," starring Brad Pitt. She separates fact from fiction in what would happen if you collided with an asteroid in "Armageddon," starring Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, and Liv Tyler. She highlights the portrayals of two pioneering astronauts - John Glenn in "The Right Stuff," starring Ed Harris and Dennis Quaid, and Neil Armstrong in "First Man," starring Ryan Gosling. Finally, she relates her own experiences in low gravity in "Passengers," starring Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, and Laurence Fishburne.
During her 30-year career at NASA, Nicole Stott worked as an engineer on the space shuttle and International Space Station programs and flew on two space missions. She is the cofounder of the Space for Art Foundation.
Check out more of her work here:
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Former NASA Astronaut Rates 9 More Space Scenes In Movies And TV | How Real Is It? | Insider
After years of watching these videos, to get two 10/10 comments is awesome. She was fun to listen to, get this lady more often!
3. Apollo 13, The Right Stuff and First Man
Nicole Stott flew on the space shuttle *three times.* Respect.
Agreed! More Astronaut Stott, please.
An astronaut that lists Galaxy Quest as a favorite movie? Completely unexpected. And Awesome!
I mean, I heard one astronaut interview (forget who it was) where they went with Talladega Nights. Astronauts like comedy too!
Its like when military submariners love the comedy Down Periscope.
@wyldhowl2821 Who doesn't love Down Periscope? That movie is a gem.
@wyldhowl2821 It was pretty good, but Operation Pettycoat is the GOAT of submarine comedies.✌️
@@TLowGrrreen Not the Dog of submarine comedies?
I love these types of videos from Insider and Wired. Nicole Stott did another one for wired and it was fantastic. I could listen to her talk all day. You need more of her.
It's much better than someone saying "aw, no way. That's so fake!"
Nicole has awesome older aunty energy. Could listen to her stories and opinions about space and space travel for days.
My wife and kids met her at a local event a couple of months ago while I was out of town. They bought her book for me and she signed it. I haven’t read it yet though. My wife says she was super cool and nice to the kids.
Playing THAT scene from Interstellar without No Time For Caution is criminal
Indeed
I watched "Apollo 13" in the theatre when it first came out. When I came out of the theatre, I thought, "Hang on, that wasn't a real space mission - that was a movie! I wonder how they did it?" I found out later that they used the Vomit Comet for a lot of the zero gravity scenes. I enjoyed the movie so much that I went back that evening to see it again in the evening showing, and a couple of days later, I took my young nephew to see it. It remains one of my top favourite movies to this day.
Would love to see The Expanse in there.
No. Event horizon.
Oye Beltalowda!
@@chuckh4077Both, but Event Horizon's first scenes were already questionable.
I was hoping The Expanse was on here. Especially after mentioning high G's in space and how they deal with that in The Expanse series.
The expanse is why I came to this video. I'm disappointed to hear it's not here.
This channel seems to do the same 5 space movies over and over and over and over again. It’s annoying
IMO; probably the best “How Real is It?” video that Insider has done. Some of the experts they bring in mix in their opinions while making it seem like facts and although they are mostly right, there is room for other experts to contradict those experts (and sometimes they do,) this is the most accurate expert they have ever had. She’s all facts and it coincides with all of the other astronauts experience as well. MORE ASTRONAUTS PLEASE!!! 🚀
23:18 "Don't open that! It's an alien planet! Is there AIR!? YOU DON'T KNOW!!"
... still is, hands down, one of the best - and scientifically accurate - lines in the history of all sci-fi media.
And the delivery was so so brilliant.
Fun fact: NASA's own research (on dogs, chimps and one unfortunate technician named Jim Le Blanc) tells us that even a normal human would _probably_ recover mostly unharmed after 1-2 minutes in vacuum, albeit _not_ immediately. And of course Peter Quill is :).
(great video though, fun to hear about this stuff from someone that actually did it)
But after the second movie.....Peter Quill...........isn't anymore. Lol. 😉
I think the 3 astronauts of Soyuz 11 would’ve disagreed with you…
@@4523bgb I would imagine his DNA is still mixed though surely? Even if the... light is off.
@@scalpingsnake Ego said he would be 100% human, but I honestly wouldn't be mad if that was the case.
@@4523bgbhe may have lost his explicit superpowers but he is still half celestial genetically.
The First Man footage… Using the real footage was incredible - and made possible because NASA put *AMAZINGLY* high quality cameras and film on/in the Saturn V to record every possible (with the technology of the day) angle for study later.
Notably, the footage of the ring dropping away - the film canister for that camera was then dropped away a few moments later, and made to survive reentry, to be caught by a waiting ship in the ocean. There was no live video downlink like SpaceX has with their modern systems.
I wanna grab a glass of wine with Nicole and just listen to her stories about space. She seems so (forgive me for this) down to earth.
"in order to keep falling around the earth". This is exactly what orbit is, love to hear it said this way.
Yes to Galaxy Quest 👍😄👍
Underrated and super funny
True (one of my all-time favorites), but the Real Stuff was brilliant, too.
Absolutely hilarious movie to me for some reason. I love that movie.
@jvlicious, Absolutely agree with your kudos but in no way is it underrated.
@mitchellmelkin4078 Needs discovery by more people, mayhaps 😀
For the ones who haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy. The only reason why he didn't die when his face froze up is because (Peter Quill) is only half human. The other part is "Celestial" (super human abilities/almost god like)
But he lost all his celestial powers in Vol. 2
@hughgo2 true, because movie lol
@@hughgo2powers perhaps, but would that include the DNA?
I dont think ego is a celestial tho.🤔
We've seen how celestials are made and thats not how ego came to be.🤷♂️
NEEEEEEEEERD
Galaxy Quest! ❤
No. Flash Gordon
Part of the Multi-Axis test was for if a thruster bank malfunctioned (as it did on early Apollo missions) or the system went haywire and begun spinning you in all directions, you'd be able to function and hopefully properly assess your problem and trouble-shoot.
I don’t know much about space, but I AM an experienced water and sewage treatment engineer. I’ve rated scenes in 3 films. In “Batman Begins”, if they poked a hole in a water main, there would have been a geyser that flooded the basement, drowning all the bad guys. In “Shawshank Redemption”, the opposite would have been true. When he poked a hole in a non pressurized sewage line, there would NOT have been a geyser. Finally, “Finding Nemo”. Nemo would have been shredded going through the treatment plant.
My memory of it needs to be refreshed some myself, but how do you feel about how things were in The Dark Knight Rises? Bane was sorta in the sewers in some fashion, and you had things like the "follow him" scene where Commissioner Gordon got washed down the pipes so to speak.
I was also a little confused by the area that Bane and Batman fight in, why it looked like that, the purpose of it and such. Was it some kind of cistern that just wasn't (remotely) full?
If you need former composer to rate waltz scenes in movies... I am here
Lmao 😂
Comment of the week! 😀
Lmfaoooooo
Love your newest piece, Mozart
Don't they need an Austrian to rate Waltz scenes?
Very happy to see this video, congratulations to everyone involved. Learning a lot.
Favorite being GalaxyQuest makes me so freaking happy. Also, I love that her rating of Guardians was because she'd seen the whole movie.
“If you go outside without your helmet on it’s going to be a pretty quick transition to….. not being in a great condition.” The most eloquent way to say “you’re dead”, ever.
The bigger problem with the fire extinguisher to get to another space station is that orbital mechanics don't work that way
I read an article where a reporter got to use the simulator for the MMU. They first put him, I think, 300 yards from the shuttle, but with no orbital mechanics. Just flat free fall. That wasn't too difficult. Then they turned on orbital mechanics. Of course, he ended up nowhere near the shuttle. Even a few hundred yards, it make a huge difference.
Hey! WALL-E managed... "dancing".
Christopher Nolan is probably in tears at Interstellar only getting 7/10
That was harsh indeed.
and that's like the most realistic scene in the entire movie lol. I could be wrong... been a long time since I watched it.
He can be glad for anything over 2.
0:16 that's Sunita Williams an Indian American genius with her....🥰🥰🥰♥️♥️🥳
I thought that was Cady Coleman?
I don't understand how anyone could knowingly give this great lady and female astronaut a disslike.
Awesome, she mentioned rocketman. Love that movie, I was hoping she'd review it. Even though she didn't review it, it's even better that she said she loved it, and galaxy quest
Since I was 6-years-old, I have complained that scenes in outer space would be silent, there would be no noise of rockets, explosions, etc..
Check out Firefly - every scene in space is completely silent.
Cool story
You can’t see the stars is in outer space either
This was such a joy to watch.
Next video: flat earther "expert" reviews all of these space scenes and rates them all a 1, because space is a myth.
🌏 Would thoroughly enjoy watching that 👏😅
Nicole is amazing. True inspiration!
Serious awesome aunt vibes. More of her, please.
Galaxy quest is one of my favorite movies! Not just favorite space movies!
Wish you include Deep Impact, The Martian, and the Space Odyssey films.
I like how Matt Damon redeems his astronaut character in the Martian 😂 he was like I ain’t going out like that we making ANOTHER ONE ☝🏾
0:41 The Byford Dolphin incident is a horrendous demonstration of extreme air pressures equalizing
What amazed me the most about Interstellar is the inclusion of time dilation. It's a very real thing when you're dealing with immense gravitational forces, usually associated with black holes. Depending on how close you get to it time for you will go by much slower than it does for someone who's farther away from it. Black holes are so strong time just break downs the closer you get to it. It's so bad that to an outside body once you reach the event horizon it'll look like you're standing still. In reality you're already long gone. As far as we know they are the most extreme force in the universe.
8:01 I feel like as an astronaut, she would’ve known that the fire extinguisher would push her back, so she would brace herself accordingly.
Exactly
i think that's the biggest problem with that movie, the main character seems completely oblivious to very basic principles (of course that's because the audience is ignorant of them) then again maybe it simply depicts a near future NASA budget where basic training isnt affordable.
First Man is a frightening bit of a story.
It basically paints that mission as a broken man signing up for a low chance of survival mission because of his personal grief.
Would love to get some psych on that.
Dreadful film
I'm glad she mentioned rocketman. That's such a great movie
Her : "I don't know if the extremes of it would be possible"
Cooper : "no... it's necessary!"
Wall-E has the best zero gravity fire extinguisher scene
Enjoyed these, more please!
6:08 90%+ of the heat from re-entering the atmosphere is from compression not friction.
i felt the entire space nerd community start typing when she said that lol
13:48 For the broken window, the glass was shown falling inward. Wouldn’t the glass be blown outward into space by the violently escaping gas?
12:00 On thing I noticed is that they used dust clouds coming off the tires in atmosphere (not sure how much of it was IRL vs CGI). Since the moon has no atmosphere, the dust coming off the tires doesn't billow, spread as much, or slow down like it does in the clip.
I love how in the 1st guardians they just have him freeze alittle & then scientists were criticizing it so in the 3rd one they added some swelling & discoloration (like radiation poisoning)
To be fair: Peter is 50% alien, so, yeah, he could recover from the damage done to his body.
Good point
And not just any alien, he's part Celestial at that
Galaxy Quest goes hard, good choice.
Awesome video, keep up with great work :)
In Guardians of the Galaxy, he survives because he's half human, half celestial. Just like Thor survived long-term space exposure. Within the lore of the depicted universe, it makes sense.
She's right Galaxy quest and rocket man are the best source movies.
If you do another of these I'd love to see an astronaut react to
Marooned (1969)
Moonraker (1979)
Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983)
Capricorn One (1977)
Apollo 18 (2011)
Moontrap (1988)
Space Cowboys (2000)
For All Mankind (TV Series 2019-)
2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
Space Brothers (TV Series 2012-2014)
Outland (1981)
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969)
Moon Zero Two (1969)
Life (2017)
About interstellar as "experience Kerbal pilot" I can say, the likelyhood the stations spins exactly with the center of the airlock in the center of the rotation is basically zero.. if you cant bring the other vehicle to stop spinning by itself, its basically lost.
Yo, this is next-level cool! Got a real astronaut breaking down space scenes-keeping it real with what's accurate and what’s pure sci-fi cap.🚀🌌
This was great, I've always wondered how much was speculation on the part of the movie makers and how much was actually rooted in reality.
Spectacular video!
The one detail missed with Star Lord is him being half Celestial, which is obviously a departure from reality but also a big factor in his physiology and recovery.
@4:34 he is not human. he is a mixed human and alien child. he also has some superhuman abilities
5:50 a very small amount of damage to the Shuttle Columbia heat shield on the wing is why it fell apart during re entry.. despite nasa knowing foam from the fuel tank had damaged it during take off.. my friend lost his father bc of their negligence
In the case of Galaxy Quest, its not the interaction of astronauts that we see on screen. Its the interaction of actors forced to be astronauts that we see.
Galaxy Quest, great movie!!!
16:03 Isn't that Scott Glenn?
16:30 Isn't that Dennis Quaid?
16:36 Isn't that Lance Henriksen?
And so on... a lot of famous actors in a movie I haven't heard about 😁
A great movie and a great book by Tom Wolfe. Check it out!👍
I love how she rates the ones she says are more "realistic" sci-fi less than the wilder sci-fi
It’s interesting the right stuff you’re talking about is John Glenn and then the Mission control guy is Scott Glenn
The way I look at it in GotG 3 with Quill's recovery is that the advance medical equipment available to them in that situation is what probably allowed him to make a full recovery. I mean we are talking about a movie where they were able to re engineer a racoon to be able to walk upright and have a genius intellect so putting a human back together after a half minute in space shouldn't be that unrealistic.
Man, that editing at 20:18 was no bueno. That wasn't the 3rd stage lighting, it was the 2nd S-II stage, after the first stage (S-IC) was jettisoned. The ring coming off was the skirt that protected the 5 J2 engines from staging. The 3rd stage would have been the S-IVB, after they were already going horizontal
In episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a magic xylophone or something? Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
The pressure inside of that spacecraft was 1 atmosphere and as it has been experimentally proven, there is absolutely no way 1ATM pressure would destroy that airlock
Rocket Man is such a fun movie I love it.
Never give up, never surrender!
Gonna watch Sunshine tomorrow, would love to see if they got anything accurate.
Love that she acknowledges Armageddon isn't very "real", but gives it a 10/10 for "excitement"! lol
I don’t mean to be correcting an astronaut but isn’t the heat from re entry mainly due to compression of the atmosphere?
Orbiting is not flying. It's falling with style.
Hollywood always seems to forget that the vacuum of space would not only suffocate someone unfortunate enough to encounter it, but also cause some other very nasty things.
Ms. Stott flew on the shuttle three times. Twice aboard Discovery and once on Atlantis:
I just heard an astronaut say "completely wacky." My day is complete.
11:37 - Guns on the moon. How perverse.
Regarding that rover. After playing ungodly amounts of Mass effect, I'm very confident I have mastered the skills to drive one of those. I was very good at flipping them over :P
….I was fully prepared to rage quit and uninstall UA-cam if she didn’t give Apollo 13 a 10/10.
Delete the platform.
I expected a 9/10 because of the over-the-top acting and at times unprofessional behavior by the astronauts. But for technical details it's 10/10 obviously, as this literally happened.
And really no discussion of 2001?
@MikeR773 this is part 2 I think 2001 was discussed in the last one.
@@rossbooth4635ah fair enough. Didn’t pick up on that. Thanks.
There's one important aspect they miss out in space movies (except for Apollo 13): the use of checklists before starting a procedure. Digital or paper checklists are very-very necessary to prevent forgetting a step, and to alert to you cautions and warnings "before" starting-up, shutting-down, taking-off, landing, operating or manipulating any system. Airline pilots use checklists during every flight... so do astronauts.
I hate how a lot of media portrays how humans exposed to the vacuum of space are affected and how long till death. Generally they don’t take into consideration pressure changes and thermodynamics.
In fact if you were exposed to the vacuum you would actually start heating up fast instead of cooling down.
The chemical processes in the body are still happening which creates heat energy but since the body is in a vacuum the heat has no where to go essentially making your body one big heat insulator.
Freezing only sets in after a couple of hours/ days after death and after the body’s chemical processes have slowed down or completely stopped.
On top of that the bloating and expansion of the body is dependent on the change in pressure. You can absolutely buy time for an individual in the vacuum of space if you slowly lowered the pressure in the airlock to a suitable level and then exposed them to a vacuum.
THE RIGHT STUFF is one of the best astronaut-based movies ever made.
What an interesting lady. I could listen to her expounding on the tribulations of working in space all day long.
Speaking of rovers on the moon, there's some side missions in Gran Turismo 6 where you drive a rover on the moon, the low gravity is so insanely aggravating. A tiny rock will flip the darn thing.
Yesss! Galaxy Quest and Rocketman! She's got good taste!
The fire extinguisher would work, but she would have to thrust from her exact center of gravity. Otherwise she would move in arc, or would just start flipping around on her axis.
I have just fallen in love with this woman!
An interesting video I just happened across, enjoyed it. I pick apart realism in movies, which my wife loves 😂, so it’s cool to get these comments on movies I’ve seen a number of times, from someone knowledgable…not just me going…that doesn’t seem right
AFAIK spaceships do not have special engines or engine controls for rotating the ship around arbitray axes. Although it its possible to use the engines to exert a torque it would be nearly impossible to rotate the ship around one specific axis (the docking system) manually and even harder to do these kind of corrections shown in the movie as each thrust of an single engine would change everything: translation speed, rotation speed and axis. And most axis of rotation are simply unstable: Even if your ship rotates around the right axis for a moment it starts to tumble by itself.
So I think docking to a fast rotating station is just possible with a computer controlled, fully automatic docking system. But these days also modern jets are aerodynamic unstable and need constant computer thrust corrections to not fall from the sky. So this might be possible, but not in a makeshift way as shown in "Interstellar", it would take engineers years to work it out.
May the force be with you
Wait, wait, wait, wait. You're telling me a Michael Bay movie wasn't realistic? I never would've expected that!
Wait, 16:04. Did you guys edit that clip? Or were we just supposed to not notice the soft jump cut?
My favorite was Armageddon when they said "get the halon!" As the station burned. Halo works by removing the O2 from the area killing the fire... why would you have that on a space craft
Halon works by stopping the chemical reaction. CO2 is used to displace oxygen.
So disappointing that the guest did not debunk the whole freezing in the vacuum of space thing, all of the fluids on the surface of your body would actually boil away, because boiling doesn't have to be from temperature, it can also be from lack of pressure. And vacuum is actually a great insulator, which means that your body would cool extremely slowly, only by radiating heat away, there is nothing to conduct or convect heat away. It would have been really great to have the Guardians 3 clip be followed by the scene in the expanse where a person intentionally does a hard vacuum Transit from one spacecraft to another and barely manages to survive, because it portrays everything extremely accurately
100% - I really respect her experience but this was disappointing
Yeah she dropped the ball on that one.
NDT says you actually don't freeze up like that in space because there's no atmosphere... 🤔
Amazing!
What an amazing woman. Great insights.
You guys really need to do a "Teacher reviews classroom scenes in movies" - It would be hilarious.
To the films credit, Starlord is only half human and half celestial which helped him survive the affects of the power stone😁
I would love to see an astronaut review "For All Mankind "
What she says about the heatshield and friction is ok, but there is more to it. The heat is not an unavoidable danger, it's an asset. If you want to land an orbiting object, you just have to decelerate it. On the moon, with no atmosphere, you would use rocket fuel which is very expensive to transport from the Earth up. But on the Earth we have a free way to decelerate : the atmosphere. What the capsule does is it maximizes the way it uses air to decelerate without having to consume precious fuel. It's not really friction that makes the capsule heating : at these enormous speed, the pressure of the air on the heatshield makes the air heating : not the friction, the pressure (when you compress a gaz, it's getting hotter : ideal gas law PV=nRT). The air gets so hot that it becomes a plasma : the air never touches the heatshield. The trick is : you exchange kinetic energy with heat energy that you dump into the atmosphere. For this to happen, you have to have a heatshield which stops the heat energy to go into your spacecraft, wasting this p^recious decelerating energy. And it has a nice side effect : it protects the astronauts !
Hey, Nicole. You look like my mom, dude! And I love your reviews too! 👌😍