RAF_Blackace, thank you very much for your reply.

I find myself shaking my head in horror and nodding my head sagely - sometimes both at the same time, physical possibility notwithstanding!

Much of what you say confirms my belief that decent science fiction is more-or-less impossible in film - the demands of satisfying the "average movie goer" rule out any possibility of doing any of the things that intelligent SF does.

On the other hand, oriental film makers - or for that matter, French film makers - don't seem to be so constrained.

I find most of Hollywood's output utterly formulaic and boring to the point of being unwatchable. Fortunately, science fiction is well served in other medias - in the written word, and in the largely forgotten medium of sound.

Anyway, this is me thinking out loud. I hope the discussion continues.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

Yes. As I said, the truly talented Directors do not follow the general rules. It is because they define the rules the rest of us try to follow. Unfortunately if we tried to do what they carry off so well, it never seems to work quite right.

So the rest of the directors stick to the tried and tested and get by.

Unfortunately this can make for very predictable films and television. Especially when you have spent many years studying filmaking and know exactly what the director is doing.

To be honest. The knowledge I gained from taking a master directors course has ruined films for me. Every time I see a scene I am more interested in the directors perspective and what he is doing with the blocking and staging than the film itself. I cannot now watch a film and enjoy it. I can know what the camera is going to do even before it does it.

However, every now and then there is a really good piece of work that I can enjoy. Thank heavens for small mercies.

If you actually watch a film you can clearly see what standard the director is at. Nearly all TV is standard shots with standard blocking and staging. Poor films are no better.

The deficit in the science aspect is an offshoot from this. If the director cannot break out of the standard mould, how good will he be at being truthful to science ?

Yes. So watch Art House and independent films. As I said, the people making these are more inclined to bend the rules and get it right. Hollywood will always cater for the mass audience.

For myself, I have broken some rules of science in my films. But I have NEVER shown a spaceship banking But, where does one draw the line ?

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

Where the story says.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

I'll point to Apollo 13 again. Technically not science fiction, but its handicapped by being a film about an event which everyone already knows the outcome and was directed by Ron Howard, who is not a top-notch director by any stretch of the imagination. (His Frost/Nixon film follows the same formula of Apollo 13. So much so, I kept expecting Tom Hanks to show up. )

Put it up against Armageddon, which had a better director than Howard. (BTW, I'm no fan of Michael Bay's work, by any means, and I loathe Armageddon.) Both movies are considered to be "exciting" and have some of the same fans. One of the things that sent me over the edge about Armageddon was the scene where the shuttle gets pasted by the asteroid fragments. None of the shuttle crew were wearing helmets, which is just plain wrong. Bay's supposedly said that they did this because if the actors were wearing helmets, the audience wouldn't be able to see the actors' faces. Apparently, Bay's never seen such movies as 2001, Outland, 2010, and The Abyss (to name but a few), where actors spend a good deal of time wearing helmets and the audience can see their faces just fine!

I don't expect a director to get things right that only a professional scientist would know, but if an "average idiot" such as myself can spot a problem, then the director needs to be kicked in the head. Repeatedly.

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

I stuck with Armageddon for most of the film. The point where I finally gave up on it for good was near the end. They have a scene where the Oil Guys are tossing out everything they won't need from the car things. When they get up there, the car things are not only armed witha 20mm cannon BUT IT'S LOADED! (sorry, Gillian). Seriously, what did they think they would need to shoot with a 20mm cannon on an asteroid?

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

You don't know many NRA members, do you? (Their philosophy seems to be that you always need a gun.)

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04 K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

Micheal May, oh dear, I feel I'll.

Ron Howard is a much better Director in my humble opinion but he is very predictable. I think his best work to date was "A Beautiful Mind" . He certainly likes the DocuFilm format. Maybe he cant find a decent fictional script.

I wish I could put my finger on why producers and directors do these things. There really is no justification in some instances. I can understand many shortcuts for the reasons I have stated, but this does not cover the sins of many other films.

My Children grew up thinking that Michelangelo was a green ninja turtle and not a great artist. Maybe today's children are being brainwashed into believing this bad science.

But as I said, there are directors that do know the science, and go to the trouble of making sure it is right.

For example, Peter Jackson is an aviation enthusiast, he owns his own fleet of vintage aircraft. When he did "King Kong" he was very pedantic that the flying scenes were correct in every detail, and they were. Pity he was not so pedantic in other areas. Nothing against Peter, he wrote a critique for one of my films, quite an honour really. Mind you, he did help in the production of it in some places.

Maybe it just shows the ignorance of some directors/producers that they do these things ?

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

I think fiction means not real

I think that's a simplistic definition.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Since it's inception, Hollywood film producers were interested in entertaining the public, not educating them. Even the most revered western genre films have a lot of falsehoods in them. In other genres, such as the latest version of the Pearl Harbor attacks, it is so far from actual events and history as to be laughable.

It would be nice for SF films to be more accurate, because the audiences seem to be of a higher intelligence level. I doubt if many SF fans are also into, say WWF wrestling....

The World Wildlife Fund has wrestling?

I would disagree strongly.

It's the limits and striving to overcome them that makes for a good story, if you treat all rules, including those of physics, as arbitrary, there's no longer a need to strive and nothing to engage the audience.

I would go so far as to say that it isn't the audience that is stupid, it's the movie makers who deliberately treats them that way.

As for the 3 second cut, that's a device to hide incompetence of a filmmaker who hasn't reached the level of "passable" yet and doesn't strive to achieve even that lowly level of competence.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

This might be an interesting exercise.

If you were a director, How would you overcome these things in Science Fiction Films and still make a good convincing camera shot ?

No sound in space, so no engine noises or explosions. How would you get around this limitation when you have to portray a fast and furious battle scene ?

Laser beams. In space you cannot see them, but would you show the beam ?

No engines burning away once forward momentum is established, and no stars moving. Without this how would you as the director give the impression of forward motion ?

Gravity, never there, but it nearly always is onscreen. Would you have it or not, and if you did, how would you justify it ?

Would you still have warp drive and teleporters ? After all, neither are credible or believable. Star Trek more or less introduced these concepts because of a low budget and the cost of building more sets, also it was easy to get around the universe in the 45 minutes they had.

How would you show a ship moving around in space, with thrusters, or banking like a plane, if you chose the former, how would you show the audience which direction the ship is moving in or the object it is heading towards in just a few seconds ?

You can add others if you wish, state the problem, and then explain how you would produce the clip sequence staying within the basic rules of physics.

It would be interesting what the replies are. After all its no good complaining about something without offering an alternative.

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

I learnt the answer to this one while watching the UFO episode "Survival". Interceptors roared through space, things exploded with loud bangs... but it was also made clear that the characters were not hearing these noises. The no-sound-in-vacuum was put to very strong (at the time) dramatic effect as injured astronaut Paul Foster tried to tell his rescuers that there was an alien nearby but they weren't to hurt it because it had saved his life - but his radio was broken, and when they touched helmets his rescuers could only hear the word "alien" so Foster had to watch helplessly as they went off and killed it.

In other UFO episodes - notably "The Dalotek Affair" - they slightly overdid the "characters not hearing sounds in space" thing. Some people failed to react to an explosion only a few dozen yards away, but in fact they would have felt it through the ground.

All these things are story-telling conventions. Not unlike having a character stumbling about in total darkness - we need some light to see what they're doing, but we also realise that they aren't getting the light.

Lasers - yes, I'd show the beam (assuming my film was about a space battle, which is not the only sort of space story one can tell). It's a means of conveying to the audience what is going on. Not unlike having a broken line appear on a map to show someone's route - nobody assumes that giant dashes are appearing on the ground!

But I'd make sure that the characters are not seeing the beams, unless they are something other than lasers.

Engines burning - that should be kept realistic. Moving stars - hmm, I do understand that Kubrik surrendered to the need to show movement. It's difficult to find the right compromise between the dullness of moving through space and the excitement you want to convey. Of course, simply having the spaceship move purposefully past the camera can be enough.

Avoid gravity as far as possible. Where's the point in having a story set in space if the one aspect of space travel that would have its biggest impact on you is completely absent?

Babylon 5, which was far from perfect, deserves a lot of credit for at least trying to convey a gravityless environment. On the station itself, people could walk around because it was spinning; Sheridan's leap from the axial train made good use of the fact that he wasn't falling in the terrestrial sense. When they did use artificial gravity, it was on ships built by people with advanced technology.

I'd rather see people make an effort to convey zero gravity (and overlook a few lapses) than see yet another space cowboy stomping about in his low-tech crate.

Another way around the gravity issue is to stop making starships into flying 5 star hotels. Those corridors and suites on the Enterprise are ludicrous. In my show, the living space on spaceships would be small, and when characters are not strapped in, they'd be moving about the cramped space with the aid of various grab handles, making it very easy to convey weightlessness. (I'd even consider going the Ophiuchi Hotline route and have characters replace their feet with extra hands!)

Characters could spend time in VR - not for silly filler-episode holodeck games, but because it would provide an environment for communicating ideas, visualising where they are and so on.

In the remake of Blake's 7 - done for radio - there was no narrative need for teleportation, so they ditched it. And quite right too! I was hoping the remake of Star Trek would ditch it too, but no.

I don't think there is any need for teleportation when you can simply show a shuttle on the planet's surface. You don't even have to show the landing and taking off every episode - simply make it clear that it does!

As for warp drive, that is necessary in a way that teleportation simply isn't. Unless you want to tell an Alastair Reynolds-type story (in which people accept that their trip to another star will mean coming home decades later) you want some means of getting to other stars within a manageable timespan. FTL may or may not be possible in the future, but in terms of storytelling, it's justifiable.

Going back to teleportation for a moment, it's acceptable as an aspect of imaginary science providing it's treated consistently - as many others have pointed out. By all means work out its limitations in advance, and then explore the dramatic implications. Do not have it allow people to duplicate themselves one week, rejuvinate people another week, turn people inside out a third week, heal the hero's wounds the fourth week, fail to heal the minor character's wounds the fifth week, and so on.

Right, my pizza is cooked. I'll be back!

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

There you go. You are drawing a personal line in the sand at some things but are willing to accept others. Films simply draw the line at different limits depending on their target audience.

Funny though, the one thing that no one ever seems to complain about is the sound of a bang some distance away arriving at the camera viewpoint at exactly the same time as the explosion. This applies for any film, it is wrong, it is against the laws of Physics, but everyone accepts it.

Great answers though. These are just examples of course, but I would love to hear your pet hates and how you would fix them and still make the film interesting and visually stimulating.

FYI my pet hates are. The Drop sequence in Alien 2 (Bad Gravity). Sounds in space. The complete disregard for distances/time involved. Every Alien being able to speak English. A complete disregard for Fuel requirements. No explanation for the continuous existence of Oxygen, Water and fresh food for many years. And many more.

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

No, this is just wrong.

As I've said time and again, something that serves the telling of a story is given priority over something that does not. And as I and others have said time and again, fantastic elements are acceptable if they are treated consistently.

Most of us who take part in these discussions are not film makers, but many of us are able to articulate our response to what we see. Sometimes our response is, "Well that's not really right but I can see why they did it." Other times our response is, "That's just rubbish."

In other words, we are generally aware of when we are being arbitrary and subjective, and when we simply recognise something as bad.

You ought to check out some of the other threads where SF in general is discussed - not just TV/film stuff.

And, as regards storytelling conventions, let's consider language. We know that the characters in I, Claudius spoke Latin. Am I going to complain that the classic BBC series had everyone talking in English? No, of course not! It is understood that the language has been translated. However, if a character who did not speak Latin was seen to be eavesdropping, and understanding what people were saying, that would not be acceptable.

This is why the English-speaking apes in Planet of the Apes is a fatal error.

Now that you've mentioned it...

But again, it depends on the story. If one of the characters is a genius who is able to make a good estimate as to the distance to the explosion by comparing the flash with the bang, then you'd hope they get it right.

Incidentally, this reminds me of a really worthless Doctor Who spinoff novel called Illegal Alien which was set in London in 1940, during the Blitz. There's a scene where someone - probably the Doctor - declares that an explosion was too loud to have been a mere bomb, so it must have been something more. How the heck do you decide a bomb was too loud without knowing how far away it was? Had the authors not been so hostile to the idea of doing actual research, they might have considered making dramatic use of the delay - "That must have been half a mile away yet it sounded as if it was in the next street!" gasped the Doctor once Ace's ears had stopped ringing.

Thank you.

I really do hope you stick around. I think you are going to annoy the heck out of me at times, but I'd rather get into a blazing row with someone as intelligent and articulate as you than... well, than some of the trolls who haunt the internet.

I've already mentioned people falling 30 feet face down onto solid rock and then getting up again as if they'd fallen 3 feet onto a mattress.

I am really tired of the "exposition" character being routinely portrayed as a genius in every field but who has no social skills.

I am tired of anything that is done simply because the last similar film did it that way.

I hate it when the "creative" team show open contempt for science, or take the attitude, "It's only science fiction so it doesn't have to make sense."

Most of all, when the "creative" team ditch known science, then have to spend valuable storytelling time informing the audience of the fictional dangers which are vastly less interesting than the real dangers that they chucked out.

I hate it when "characters" go all self-referential and start addressing the fourth wall (as if it's still a new idea!) and say things like, "This is the part where I announce my great plan."

More later.

Incidentally, that was a really good pizza.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

Well there is a greater consideration for ANY film maker, that is the budget.

I think every director would love to make Science Fiction films without gravity, (and no matter how hard the CGI artists try, they cannot seem to get it to look good) The problem is of course the cost. A Zero G flight costs a lot of money. I should know, I had the pleasure of experiencing one myself many years ago during some tests for the international space station (Nothing fantastic, just testing a Zero Gravity Tig Welder). The cost of making some stuff realistic can be inherently inhibitive.

If you watch "Solaris" for example, there really was not a lot to get wrong, the sets were fairly cheap and there were very few exterior views, hence it appears to be fairly consistent with scientific fact. One CGI image passing by the set window every few minutes was enough to convince everyone they were in space. The Exterior space shots were standard CGI which you can get very cheap these days.

In Apollo 13 they did actually use the Vomit Comet (No I didn't, but it was a very strange feeling I can tell you) to get zero G. Now that was only for certain shots and it would be an incredible expense to roll film for 20 minutes for that kind of realism.

I think most of the gripes here are not with the science aspect of films, but the general treatment of the audience by the film maker.

That is a difficult one to explain (I can not justify it), but let me have a stab.

Unfortunately there is always a target market for a film. You want them to watch it, appreciate it and talk about it afterwards to their friends, this is how you get bums in seats.

Most mainstream films these days are aimed at shotgun audiences, that is they try to pull people in from all walks of life and all ages. So they include stuff for everyone. But they want to pull in the most people so the biggest cinema going target market is aimed at slightly more than others. That is not the hi-brow scientist or even the reasonably educated individual. It is the guy working 10 hours a day at the car factory, his kids, and his wife who stacks the shelves at Tescos.

By far the biggest paying audience for films comes from the lower middle and working classes. So scientific laws are not high on the agenda when you are making a film aimed at someone who's knowledge is limited to what he reads in the Sun every day. That is the target market for Hollywood films.

This was not always the case of course, I am talking recent films made in the last 25 years or so. The fact you are disgruntled by the poor quality of science in these films should really be something you can be proud of. You are above the standard the film was made for and are clearly not happy to be treated like an idiot. If the day ever comes when scientifically educated people are in the majority, I am sure you will see a much greater attempt to conform to science fact by the film making community.

Until then, just be comforted in the knowledge that you are walking out of the cinema because of your higher understanding of the way the universe works.

BTW. I am already enjoying the company here. I love a good discussion even when people completely disagree with me. After all, if we all thought the same, life would be so boring. Hoping we can have many more on various topics over the coming future.

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

Very strange. The post I just made will not be viewable until a moderator has approved it. I thought I had got past that stage.

This one got posted straight away. Odd.

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

Just a guess, but the board might be having a reaction to the words vomit, bums, shotgun, idiots or a combination of them from a new poster. And welcome to BAUT.

This is against the laws of physics, but not quite against the laws of human biology/psychology. Humans routinely perceive two seperate events happening at the same time, just to simplify things I guess. For example if you watch someone pinch your toe you will feel it at the same time that you see it, but in reality the nerve signals from your toe can take a quarter of a second to reach your brain and you see the toe pinch before you feel it. People will often report sights and sounds happening at the same time even though we know that from the distance there must have been a delay. Of course film makers combine things such as the sight of an explosion and the sound that would be perceived much more than quarter of a second apart, but this doesn't really bother me. I just want them to get a move on. I'm more likely to be bothered by the fact that things in movies explode so easily in the first place. I think in the movie universe they must have tried to cut costs by molding control panels out of surplus plastic explosive.

Watch the Firefly series and Serenity movie to see most of those things done right.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Well there is a greater consideration for ANY film maker, that is the budget.
Granted.

I think every director would love to make Science Fiction films without gravity
I doubt that many of them even realise weightlessness would be the norm. After all, "down is towards the floor" seems to be the rule in virtually every film set in space.

I listen to a lot of Big Finish's range of Doctor Who audio plays. In audio it would cost nothing to "film" in zero g. But every spaceship has Earth-normal gravity, even powerless derelict alien ships abandoned in deep space. This is (I believe) because the teams' only "knowledge" of space is from TV and films.

The problem is of course the cost. A Zero G flight costs a lot of money.
But as I already mentioned, it's comparatively easy to convey zero g if the pilot is strapped in most of the time, and clambering about a confined space the rest of the time. It would also save budget!

I should know, I had the pleasure of experiencing one myself many years ago during some tests for the international space station (Nothing fantastic, just testing a Zero Gravity Tig Welder).
Sounds fantastic enough to me! You lucky thing...

If you watch "Solaris" for example, there really was not a lot to get wrong,
I take it you mean the remake. In the Tarkovsky version, it actually felt as if we were orbiting an ocean planet. In the remake, it didn't look like anything. And that terrible, terrible line: "Solaris is taking on mass." I hate the thought that some people might think that nonsense was in Lem's novel.

I think most of the gripes here are not with the science aspect of films, but the general treatment of the audience by the film maker.

Partly, but mostly... the story!

But to clear a point about science, I think most of us have a healthy respect for known science. But in a story set on board an advanced spaceship, we can assume that new science has been discovered - things that seem impossible now may be possible then. It would, in fact, be unrealistic to suppose that science has not advanced.

Does that mean there should be a free-for-all in science fiction? Absolutely not! If imaginary science is to feature in a story, it must be presented in a way that lets the audience know it was a creative decision rather than a mistake.

Sometimes it's enough for a character to mention hyperspace. That word is shorthand for, "We know faster than light travel is impossible but we're assuming future technology has found a way around it."

But if it appears that the film makers don't realise you can't travel faster than light (or, more likely, don't even realise that stars are lightyears apart) then it's bad science fiction.

Unfortunately there is always a target market for a film. You want them to watch it, appreciate it and talk about it afterwards to their friends, this is how you get bums in seats.

I appreciate that, but it does sometimes seem as if they are intentionally alienating audiences with an average education. (I don't think they are; it just seems that way.)

Until then, just be comforted in the knowledge that you are walking out of the cinema because of your higher understanding of the way the universe works.
I'd be more comforted by an intelligent SF film!

BTW. I am already enjoying the company here. I love a good discussion even when people completely disagree with me. After all, if we all thought the same, life would be so boring. Hoping we can have many more on various topics over the coming future.

I'm glad you feel this way, and look forward to further discussions.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

Just for you, here is my account of the experience..

I used to work at a place called Marchwood Research Laboratories near Southampton. We had a contract to do test welding using a TIG welding robot in zero gravity. The reason for the test was that astronauts sooner or later would need to be able to weld in space, we needed results to show it was even feasible. No one knew how a weld pool would behave in zero G, especially as the only possible kind of welding that could be carried out was TIG (Tungsten in Argon Gas) and this kind of welding depended on the high current arc remaining completely stable as well as the weld pool.

The Research officer was called Richard Wilgos, he was a very straight man and took everything very seriously, as most research officers did in those days. He was a product of Eaton with the high class accent, he was in dire need of a charisma transplant.

On the day of the first tests we arrived at Farnborough and were driven out onto the tarmac where we waited for the pilots to turn up. The aircraft was a modified Boeing 727, it looked just like any other aircraft from the outside.

Shortly after, a Jeep drove up and just like a scene from the damn busters, 2 pilots leapt out, they looked so young, one looked about 18 and the other about 25 (Later we were to find out that they were the best test pilots the RAF had). Richard was aghast at their age, he was not a good flier and was worried about the safety.

The pilots greeted Richard by saying. "Hi, you must be Dickie".

"Er, Richard Wilgos is the name".

"Right, Dickie it is then" The pilot replied.

Richard then questioned the safety aspects of the flight first by asking how many flights like this had they done, and how many times had this particular aircraft done Zero-G Flights.

"This is our first time Dickie, never done one before. Come to think of it neither has this aircraft". The Pilots said.

Richard looked horrified. On seeing his reaction the pilot said.

"No need to worry Dickie, we phoned the maker (Boeing) last night from the hotel and asked him if it was OK for this aircraft to do Zero-G. They said the would not guarantee the airframe at all, but if we were going to do it don't exceed more than 10 seconds because they had no idea what would happen after that".

This did not relax Richard at all.

"So, we are going to take up a whirly gig then". The pilot quipped.

"It is a zero G Robotic TIG welding capsule captain". Richard replied.

"Right, a whirly gig". The Pilot responded.

We boarded the aircraft, all of the bulkheads had been removed with just one remaining aft of the cockpit. Just 2 seats were on board and our test capsule was bolted right in front of them. Everything was clean and white, padding was everywhere.

We took off and headed for the test area over the Isle of Wight. We climbed and got ready for the first test. The pilot would tell us over the RT headsets which we both wore when to start the test. The pilots would decide when to terminate the experiment.

As we headed over the top for the first test we hit Zero G, we were strapped very tightly into our seat so we were not going anywhere. But as soon as we hit zero G the air suddenly became cloudy, almost like decompression. I realised this was dust that had suddenly risen form everything and was now suspended in the air. I was surprised at this as it appeared to be totally clean when we came on board. A 2" bolt drifted past my ear and banged into the bulkhead in front of us, they missed that one.

The pilot came onto the RT.

"Right Dickie, you can light your whirly gig up now".

"Striking an arc now captain" Richard replied.

All we had to do was press the start button, the test was completely automatic.

The co-pilot was watching the instruments and counting off the seconds. After 10 seconds they pulled up and we were returned to normal gravity.

After confirming that everything was aright the pilots went up for another drop.

Four times we went over the top, each time we spent longer and longer in Zero G.

During the last test the count reached 24. At this moment alarms suddenly came from everywhere. Apparently the instruments just went haywire.

The pilots called for a priority emergency landing back at Farnborough.

During final approach we could hear the pilots over the RT. The conversation was breaking between the landing check-list and normal converstation. Something like this.

"Oil pressure 110, are you taking Jane to the boat tonight"...

"Yes, she is looking forward to it, Flaps 20"...

We landed safely and the experiment was a success. No one has ever welded in space yet, but when they do I can think I had something to do with it in a small way.

All in all a great day out and one of the best days at work I have ever had.

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

Sounds like quite an understatement!

Great story. Thank you.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

I think I would probably have run right out the door the minute he said Boeing couldn't guarantee the airframe.

You're a lot braver than I am.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

A fun story, thanks for sharing that!

Cool story. I hate flying, but I would love to experience zero g just one....or twice.

Yes, it is certainly an experience everyone should have at least once in their lives.

That was the best day I ever had in the office.

I will save the story for another day, but one of the worst days I had in the office was when I was in a spacesuit and trapped in a reactor containment building with lethal gas and no air supply to plug into. I had 9 minutes of air in the suit when I came in. I was the wrong side of an airlock that took 5 minutes to get through. Trouble was, I had used up 5 minutes coming through the airlock to start with and another 3 minutes realising the air connectors were incompatible with my suit.

How did I make it out alive ?

This is a true story, I will tell the full story in a more appropriate forum when I get the time to type it up.

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."

Can't wait to hear it!

Which forum should I post them in ?

Cant wait to tell you when I was arrested by MI5, incorrectly I must add.

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"If you've made it to retirement without being blamed for a major disaster, you've failed as an engineer."