I suppose it has come to this. We have no manned space program anymore, Muslim outreach is a NASA priority according to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and a recent paper from a NASA postdoc suggests aliens will kill us because they can detect our global warming from light years away and think we are a threat.
After watching this video trailer for the movie, Plan 9 From Outer Space seems almost plausible now.
Plot fail – I suppose nobody in Florida noticed nor any of the thousands of NASA employees and contractors said a peep when the Saturn 5 rocket lifted off for Apollo 18. Yeah stuff like that is easy to keep under wraps. Though I haven’t seen the full movie, the trailer makes it pretty clear that I’d never want to. Originally scheduled for release in the spring, it has been delayed and now has a planned release Sept 2nd.
Hollywood, like NASA, has lost its mojo.
I feel for the crew of Apollo 17, including my friend and fellow skeptic Dr. Harrison Schmitt. This film makes a mockery of the the Apollo program and the true final mission.
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Why should we have manned space projects if our students are taught they can save the planet with knitting, raising chickens in their backyard, and farming with draft animals?
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/08/complete-barking-madness-college.html
I’m ready to go and prove this too is fiction.
Being Hollywood, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit suprised if Apollo 19 has already been greenlit and is in pre-production, and there is an option for Apollo 20, 21, 22, 23….2
I see a lot of doom & gloom about space flight, when actually it couldn’t be better. The next flight of the SpaceX Dragon will deliver cargo to ISS (and drop off a pair of comsats along the way), it was designed from the outset to become a 7-seat crew transport capable of reentry from an interplanetary trajectory. Bigelow has orders for several inflatable space stations which would make excellent living quarters for long duration missions, Boeing is hiring its *own* astronauts to test-fly the CST-100 vehicle (also 7-seat), Orbital Sciences is building a cargo-only system, and my own (XCOR) and several other companies (Masten, Armadillo, Blue Origin, and more) are developing suborbital systems that will give us the experience base to _then_ do fully reusable two-stage orbital space transports.
In a few years, the Senate Launch System will be exposed as the bloated pork that it really is, and will die a deserved death, unneeded and unmourned. Future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades!
Have you ever heard of suspended disbelief? They don’t want you to believe it, they want you to enjoy it. Maybe some gullible people might think this is a documentary, but if people are that gullible, there’s not much that can be done for them.
Fred N. says (August 24, 2011 at 7:57 am): “I thought ‘The Day after Tomorrow’ was the worst Sci-Fi flick of all time.”
Well, there’s your mistake right there: it wasn’t science fiction. It was a comedy, and a pretty good one at that. South Park’s version was even funnier.
I have to disagree with you here Anthony. The film looks fun. Also we have a mainstream movie saying than not only did the moon landings happen but there was an extra one. Don’t knock it. How many times do you have to argue that the landings really happened?
Huh? How does this ‘make a mockery of Apollo 17’? Anyone who would factor a bit of hollywood fluff and nonsense into their opinion of the legacy of the Apollo program probably has a extremely poor judgement at the least.. Why judge a movie based on a trailer? Is that like making broad based conclusions on next to no data? Sound familiar?? Lighten up, it’s just a movie.
What saddens me is that “Apollo 18, the movie” will be stored and remembered for eternity, but we lost real data of real missions, what’s up with that?
I hate to break it to you, but you can’t re-animate the dead with lightning, either…
Anthony;
I think you are overreacting a bit about this and one of your points against the film has a flaw: They do not say the “Apollo 18” mission launches from Kennedy. You are interpreting that from the footage. However there is three counter points to that:
1, The obvious point that the only film footage we got of a Saturn V launch is from Kennedy, so they had to use that for the film/promo.
2. The other place up for consideration for the Apollo program was Vandenburg Air Force Base and it’s launch complex.
3. Their is already a conspiracy theory out there that two missions were launched from Vandenburg AFB to the dark side of the moon. It’s on the Loony side since they name them Apollo 19 and 20 when the Apollo 20 Rocket was used for Skylab and they don’t use 18 at all from what I can see:
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/luna/esp_luna_36.htm
So the producers of the film probably have the Apollo 18 mission launch from Vandenburg. There they can cover the launch as a ICBM missile test and you do not have the civilians. Remember classified mission have been launched from Vandenburg before under various covers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_Air_Force_Base#Space_exploration
Apollo 18 launches head-to-head against Shark Night 3D. I wouldn’t want to put money on that box office showdown!
The vast majority of SF stories are set in the future for two main reasons: 1) They wish to explore new technology/new cultural or evolutionary developments and 2) it is much easier for the audience to accept a story that cannot be refuted by history. In fact, it is easy to accept any plot set in the future, no matter how ludicrous.
However, there have been some exceptions, but these were done specifically to make the audience think about a past event through a different perspective. A recent Dr Who episode was based during the Apollo mission in 1969 in which it was revealed that the whole of human endevor was being controlled by a race of aliens – and who had implanted the idea to go to the moon in the first place. How did they make that work? They ‘trick’ they used, was that as soon as a human looked away from an alien, he immediately forgot what he had seen, thus explaining how they could have been here unnoticed for millenia.
For Apollo 18 to pass the first test, it must 1) show us a different persepective of a past event, one that we all thought we understood, and 2) contain some credible explanation as to how it is that this new ‘reality’ was hidden from us. Not having seen the movie, I can’t comment on whether it makes us see the Apollo mission in a different light (eg, was something found in a previous mission that provided the reason for a secret 18th mission?) As for point 2, did they attempt to explain why nobody notices this mission? Maybe alien intervention using mind control. That could work in theory. An audience would likely go along with that because of the desire to suspend belief. However, if no attempt at an explanation is offered at all, this would create terrible dissonance on the audience. That would be unbelievably amateurish.
Hey,
I’ve just been contacted by some aliens who said that NASA is way over the top in thinking that they would be at all concerned about the warming, or cooling come to that, of an insignificant planet in a very remote galaxy that they are not at all interested in visiting.
boballab says:
August 24, 2011 at 12:37 pm
“2. The other place up for consideration for the Apollo program was Vandenburg Air Force Base and it’s launch complex.”
I do not know how the Vandenberg complex is designed but I do know that there were massive water reservoirs beneath the launch pad for the Saturn V. Most of the “smoke” created at liftoff was actually steam. Without this system to dissipate the enormous heat created by the huge engines everything on the pad would have melted. Does Vandenberg have this system?
No, Vandenburg was never in any serious consideration for Apollo (or any other eastward launches around the world. It WAS (and still is) the best for polar orbits.
Eastward launches are essential to use the rotation of the earth to speed up the final orbital velocity w/r to the earth’s surface. The near-1000 mph “headstart” of the earth’s rotation is reduced as you go north, and the Cape’s 28-odd degree latitude is significant enough to be a problem. But it is on continental US, and is just about the most southern you can get in the US. (TX is near equal in latitude, but the debris from launches goes back over the FL landmass. Too much of a safety limit at launch.) France, launching closer to the equator than Canaveral, has won several bids from the US because of its “orbital speed” advantages.
Cape Canaveral was chosen because it does stick out noticeably into the Atlantic, and both beaches north and south of the cape were near-empty. Therefore, NASA-USAF launches at the cape had a few more degrees and a few more seconds of sideways flight before the rocket needed to be exploded when they go off course. From Vandenberg, the north-to-south launches also go out over the Pacific and are “safer” than launches going back to the east over land. Vandenberg launches headed west as anti-missile targets towards the Pacific islands are definitely less efficient than regular Canaveral launches eastward put up with the lost flight speed for the benefits of a long ballistic missile type flight over the Pacific before getting shot down.
Vandenberg was intended as a backup/alternate Space Shuttle launch point for polar flights, and those facilities were started, stopped, re-started, etc. That may be what you’re thinking of.
I agree with Anthony on this one. Plausibility is the hallmark of good science fiction. Given what I saw of the trailer, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy has more basis in reality, and is more plausible. While yes it is just a movie, so was an Inconvenient Truth. The damage done by that pathetic attempt of social engineering is still being felt. This movie in my opinion is no better. So let them make a pathetic attempt at a fictional thriller, I will not watch it and will share my opinion of the worthless drivel that this attempt at selling moving images with sound represents.
When the news of this came out I laughed too. I personally watched the Shuttles take off from as far south as my old office near the Miami airport. And I regularly watched them from the front door of my home over the last decade from just north of West Palm Beach…. it’s not likely that ANY Saturn5 liftoff could ever go “unnoticed”.
I fear that 10 years from now kids will grow up thinking the movie is plausible history and flood the message boards about it. But like the 1964 movie “First Men in the Moon” it might be fun to watch….
Oh you spoil sport! You’re just like my daughter who sat through an entire movie complaining that it wasn’t realistic. One of my favourite moves is groundhog day … is that realistic? Oh you spoil sport! Do you ever get Deja Vu? One of my favourite moves is groundhog day … is that realistic.
I agree with you Anthony. What a senseless waste of celluloid. I’m afraid “The Greatest Generation” has been replaced with “The Lamest Generation,” especially in Tinseltown.
The hypothetical worlds of CGI are wearing thin.
The lack of a real mission may correlate to the general malaise of our society at present.
These dreamworlds don’t hold a candle to real exploration/exploitation.
My father, an actor, used to say that you should never go to a movie about doctors with a doctor, a movie about lawyers with a lawyer or a movie about anything with an actor. Should add a movie about science with any kind of scientist.
Ha-ha!
While the whole world was watching the aftermath of Tuesday’s Virginia earthquake,
a Saturn V launch was sneaked out of Florida. (Seismographs all busy, you see.)
It will land on Sunday, while everybody’s preoccupied with the hurricane (which They also prearranged to distract attention from the Mission.)
I like my movies to be adventurous, dangerous, funny, exciting, romantic, & sad, a bit like real life actually, we don’t see enough of it IMHO! However, I won’t see the movie because my imagination won’t take that leap where the moment something really obviously practical falls apart, the script “invents” a means for it to occur. That’s what being an engineer is like I am proud to say. Now pure escapism like Star Trek Movie was realy good, with Kirk mentioning he had to risk engaging Warp-Drive within the Solar System to intercept the advancing alien object. At least the script writers had thought about Warp-Drive & what its effects might be! The other thing is that the people who will go & see Apollo 18, starred in it, filmed it, directed it, produced it, edited it, etc, were probably not alive when Apollo was going on, or at least still in nappies (dypers?) at the time!
Making it to the moon and back with late 60s technology seems like science fiction these days. On the other hand things that are simple tend to be more reliable and easier to fix if they do break. Think about working on your own car in 1969 compared to 2011. Hell, I didn’t even want a car with electric windows. I see that not as “a feature” but as “one more thing that can break and be a pain in my ass”.