Even though it strives for realism, Apollo 13 is riddled with obscure technical errors. I'll start off with one. Oh, and you're a true PAN if you understand this one
Right after Lovell announces that he sees Oxygen venting from the Service Module, there's a brief close-up of the pressure/quantity guages for the cryogenic tanks. Even though the spacecraft is less than 1/4th of the way into the mission, the No.1 Hydrogen tank only reads 60% quantity, the No. 2 65%.
No wonder they were so concerned about loss of power

I've posted mine before - seeing the Fra Mauro landing site and the Tsiolkovsky crater at the same time is quite a feat!

For all that, they got far more right than any other 'space' movie I've ever seen before.

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith

It's not technical, but...

Fred Haise didn't sneak a copy of "Spirit in the Sky" on board, then play it during their broadcast. "Also sprach Zarathustra," the theme to 2001, was what was actually played. Tom Hanks makes a reference to this. It seems like a fairly transparent ploy to pad the soundtrack (which is one of only 20 cds I own) with "era" music.

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"Never tell me the odds!" -JayUtah

* In the post-party scene in the beginnning of the movie, the moon should be just a crescent - Apollo 11 (and all the others) took place during lunar morning.

* During the launch, do the umbilical arms swing the wrong way, or is it just me? Anyway, they should all separate at the same time, not separately (though it is a neat scene).

* There are some details of the MLP close to the tail of the Saturn V which are missing: the hold-down arms and the tail service masts simply aren't there. Which makes me wonder what is supporting the rocket 8-[

* The TLI burn takes place when the Moon is on the other side of the Earth, so it would not be visible...

* 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.

Oh, and the flames of the engine are of course much more ragged and uneven than the real thing, which would have been smooth and (I think) near-transparent, except for the transient.

What else? There are of course minor differences between the transcripts and the movie dialogue, but those aren't really technical arguments. However, I wish they'd showed the light-speed delay better - it would have been noticeable for most of the scenes.

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"

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!"

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"Earth diameter is 7,900 miles, and Moon diameter is 2,160 miles. It takes on average 90 minutes to complete one Earth orbit, so one Moon orbit should take roughly 25 minutes." - Sam "NasaScam" Colby

Bearer of the highly coveted "I found Venus in nine Apollo photos" sweatsocks.

DataCable^2008 A+

Ok, let's talk low tech here since I'm not a science dude. During lift off, the rocket is still clearing the tower yet the wives are looking up to what looks like above 60 degrees and crying and so forth. Cut to mission control and then a very cool shot from above the rocket. Then, BAM, close up of Mrs. Lovell looking back down to what seems like just above the tower.
For me, this ruins the whole scene. Swap those two shots and it would have been perfect. I don't see how they could have gotten it so wrong when the rest of the flick is so very good.

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The markings on the Saturn V are those of the test vehicle, not the ones actually launched.

The logo in the white room indicates Rockwell International. At the time of the mission, the company was called North American Rockwell.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Jim Lovell's corvette was blue not red.

LOS when the spacecraft goes over the far side of the moon is accompanied by a shot of them crossing the terminator when they should have crossed over the terminator much earlier before LOS.

Here's a whole passle of inaccuracies in Apollo 13. :P

You may be interested in this site with a commented script of the movie.

Harald

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

They missed out the bit about MCC-5. It would also be nice if as well as correcting errors, they'd elaborate on technical points like change to Abort Mode 1B, the cutoff of the S-IC inboard motor, the PC+2 burn, the SHe tank exploding, etc.

Yeah, but then the movie would be 7 hours long.

So, the part where Fred Haise battled the alien queen in a power loader, that didn't really happen?

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Unfortunately, we're down to about 17 ounces of the highly unstable stuff that does.

I didn't like the moon being there. Because, as well all know, there is no moon.

And this is a bad thing?

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

The Houston scenes were not filmed in Houston
--- Just because Houston had changed too much in the 25 years between the actual events and the filming is no reason to not show it.

I was lucky enough to hear Jim Lovell speak on the 25 aniversery of Apollo 8, and it was for that mission that he used the line about he and his buddies going to the moon rather than him (Lovell) going on a family trip for Christmas. In the movie they turned that funny line into spring break for the family.

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Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

--Niels Bohr, Danish Physicist.

And deprive everyone of the thousands of anachronisms to nitpick.

Maybe Ron Howard will release a special "Extended Director's Edition" like Peter Jackson did with the first two LOTRs. A special 7 hour edition.

Here's one pick for you: Buzz Aldrin has no hair to speak of in real life. Couldn't they've shaved the actor portraying him?

Also, from what I've read on IMDB, the Saturn 5 doens't even match the test rockets scheme.

Also, judging from the scenes with the LOS and lunar sunrise, more than half the moon is in sunlight. Guess its really a neutron star then, huh?

And just for fun: THERE'S NO SOUND IN SPACE!!! :wink:

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This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. - Jor-El

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

I would like more backstory of what caused the accident, referencing the Apollo 10 incident and the CDDT.

And neither are the stars visible.

You mean, because it would have to be rotating in the opposite direction from Apollo 13's orbit, at least as rapidly as Apollo 13 was orbiting it?

Nah, it wouldn't have to be a neutron star to hold together at such a low rotational speed. An ordinary garden variety run-of-the-mill white dwarf would do just as well.

I referred to a neutron star because you could see more that half of its surface due to graviational distortion. Or something like that. I wasn't reffering to rotational speed. And in that case, for the moon's position to shift against the sun to allow for more than 1/2 to be in sunlight, it would have to have a faster orbit. Kind of like Mercury. Or not. I'm confusing myself now. ](*,)

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This is no fantasy. No careless product of wild imagination. - Jor-El

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

The single biggest inaccuracy in the movie is that the phases of the Earth and Moon are treated inconsistently throughout it, apparently deliberately so for dramatic effect. At one point, if I recall correctly, both the Earth and Moon are depicted as full, even though the spacecraft is in between them, which would make this optically impossible. At another point, the spacecraft's passage to the far side of the Moon is depicted as passage over the terminator to the dark side, even though this would not have been the case at that time-- and then, later on, the astronauts can see things on the far side, which obviously would not have been possible if the whole far side had been dark.

My impression was that the script was actually far more scrupulously accurate than the special effects, which were tweaked more for storytelling purposes.

Perhaps they had backed off of the "far side is the dark side" treatment by this time, thus the dark side could have been being lit by earthshine, making viewing possible.

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Not a nitpick -- a positive comment for a change... =D>

Watching Apollo 13 the other day, and being aware that all the launch footage was CG, not stock, I noticed something interesting.

The F1 exhaust plumes were shown with remarkable accuracy, right down to the "dark band" just below the engine bell (caused, as we discussed before in the LC forum, by the turbine exhaust which is released in an annular ring to help keep the bell relatively cool).

This little detail is just another indication of the lengths that Ron Howard went to in maintaining the accuracy of the film. There are, of course, areas where historical accuracy is stretched a bit (the on-board conflicts, merging several characters into one, mentioning widely-separated lunar features in one scene, and so on). But the technical details of the hardware, and the language in the MOCR and communications with the spacecraft, were done very well indeed.

In the Lovells' commentary, Jim Lovell said that when Ron Howard set out to build his own MOCR set, the technical advisors thought he did such a good job they couldn't tell if they were in the set or the real one.

I think what James Tichenor says is true. Only bad CG is ever acknowledged because good CG blends into the background too well to be noticed (which applies to the launch sequence). Similarly, only historical inaccuracy gets noticed.

The exhaust flames weren't CG from what I understood, though I have no idea how they actually did it. Looks very nifty, though =D>

More nitpicks, mostly from the launch sequence:

* During launch, the F-1 engines were covered in asbestos insulation with a foil-like "batted" covering. The insulation was missing in the movie.

* I'm not certain about this, but doesn't the BPC cover the hatch window?

* BPC jettison is reported by the CapCom well before Tom Hanks says "tower jet"

* There's a slight delay between the line "SECO" and the engine cut-off being shown. (yeah, I know this is just whining, but I notice it, ok)

* In the "dream" where Tom Hanks is bouncing around on the moon, there's an unmistakable swirl of dust around his footsteps. Guess they should've shot that scene in a vacuum chamber...

And a last one:

* Fred Haise didn't chew bubblegum :P

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"

The hatch window wasn't blocked by the BPC (though I don't know if there was a pane in the BPC or just a cut-out. According to "Virtual Apollo", the CDR could also watch through is rendezvous window.

http://www.apollosaturn.com/boost.htm

Harald

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"Flying in space is risky business, but just staying on this planet is risky business too." - John Young, astronaut

Good one! I'm just curious - how did you ever find that out? :-?

I think it was in the Ron Howard commentary, but I may have encountered it elsewhere.

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"

I spotted another one the other day, which shows that:

a) I've seen this movie too many times
b) I know too much about the Apollo program
c) I need to get a life

During LM jettison (just before reentry), the probe assembly on the CM is jettisoned along with the LM. In the movie, it's shown still attached (though it's gone as it should be when you see the CM floating in the ocean later).

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"We do not require reality to conform to the expectations of the ignorant"