Isn't it funny how the main topic in media outlets is the accuracy (or lack of) of the science in the movie!? What other movie is held to this standard?
Gravity, last year.
For a film's science to be discussed and critiqued seriously is a compliment, whether that's how the critic intended it or not. Few bother to go out of their way to point out the scientific inaccuracies in most genre movies because they're expected. The fact that the scientific in/accuracies of this film are getting so much attention is a testament to that fact that audiences, critics, and scientists recognize and appreciate that the film strove to be more than the average genre film. It might not have achieved the (unrealistically) complete accuracy some demand, but it at least made a major effort. The fact that it can be used to broaden understanding and encourage further study of relativity/time dilation and wormholes/black holes through using it as a teaching tool or pointing out its mistakes is a good thing, not a bad one.
People who get upset at Neil DeGrasse Tyson's tweets about this (which he's been very positive about) and
Gravity, for instance, should keep in mind that he's trying to use popular culture to increase the layman's understanding of physics and to make complex scientific issues relatable to the general audience. Teacher frequently use scifi movies as teaching tools for students as a gateway to gain their interest before hitting the harder subject matter.
Can anyone please explain how that rocket can take off from NASA without, like, destroying the conference room where they spoke about Wormholes and Saturn? I mean the rocket was not on the vehicle to be moved anywhere, and it was right next to that conference room (note when Michael Cain opened the door)
The remnant of NASA in the film was based out of the nuclear bunker of the former NORAD command center under Cheyenne Mountain (it's still maintained as an alternate command center), so the conference room door would be a hardened steel door anchored into the surrounding rock roughly similar to the one below and the entire room would be on shock absorbing springs. It was designed to survive several hits from multi-megaton nuclear warheads, so the rocket blast would be child's play by comparison, especially with vents directing the bulk of the thrust away from the room. I just figured Nolan was a fan of Hugo Drax's killer conference room under a launchpad from
Moonraker (see bottom). NORAD makes sense as a base of operations for NASA once the military collapses due to its being the home of US Space Command and already set up to monitor spacecraft and incursions into North American airspace (which could be used to pick up the gravitational anomalies).
Also it was sure was convenient that Cooper lived in the middle of nowhere yet was about an hour's drive away from the super secret NASA base...
Convenient or by design? The future humans were using the gravity waves in the atmosphere to communicate with NASA, and likely directed them to NORAD in Colorado Springs which is within a day of where Coop and Murph --who they knew solved the gravity equation that allowed for the mass evacuation of Earth if you believe in a bootstrap paradox-- lived.
There were cornfields and dust bowls, which implies a midwest setting, Coop's farm was within a day's drive of Colorado Springs, which suggests eastern Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, or Northern New Mexico. There were also mountains in the background of the farm, probably the foothills of the Rockies.
I thought they were saying that the big circular structure we saw them working in was the space station they were going to launch into orbit if they could only solve the gravity equation.
It was.
My guess is they started building it in the existing hollowed out portions of Cheyenne Mountain and then excavated the rest of the mountain as they went on to provide aggregate for use in the concrete forming the interior superstructure of the station, and to eventually leave a hole in the roof for the ship/station to launch out of.
