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Originally Posted by AstroSmurf
* The entire burn maneuver strikes me as rather strange. The way they wanted to alter the trajectory, the descent stage engine would need to be run perpendicular to the direction of travel. This also fits better with being able to see the Earth through the LM window; if they were oriented the way the movie shows it, it seems to me that the CSM would block the view.
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For that matter, they weren't even looking the right way, were they? Hanks was trying to keep the earth in his view while looking out the forward LM window, not the docking window, am I remembering that correctly?
And even though I'm not fully aware of the physics involved, I did think that performing the burn in the direction of travel looked a little odd. "Ok, so they're accellerating toward Earth. What does that accomplish?" But I suppose for a general movie audience, with little concept of raw Newtonian physics, would be confused if they'd tried to depict a perpendicular burn. "What? They're going to miss the earth completely now!"