What a turkey!
It's sad, really. The basic story isn't bad, and could've made for a fun and exciting flick... if the writers weren't seemingly going out of their way to make the viewer laugh and/or cry at the ludicrous details.
Why? Why do people try to write science fiction and then not even bother trying to learn at even the most basic about their chosen subject? It's a lament that's as old as movies, I suppose; still, "Space Cowboys" is one of the more egregious examples. Evidently they had a decent budget; they could have spent a little on research.
I could trot out miscellaneous stupidities like: 1000 miles is not geosynchronous orbit; 1000 miles is a ludicrous place to put a satellite; the Shuttle cannot fly to anywhere near 1000 miles up; a satellite in geosynchronous orbit will (essentially) never decay into the atmosphere; and so forth.
You'd deride me as a nerdish wet blanket, I suppose. But more fundamentally, the level of stupidity this movie ascribes to practically everyone is stratospheric. The very concept of NASA putting four rookies with a month of training onto a shuttle and sending that shuttle to rendezvous with and grapple a satellite ABOUT WHICH VIRTUALLY NOTHING IS KNOWN (like the design, even the mass) is about as far removed from reality as can be imagined. There isn't even a pretense of building a willing suspension of disbelief. And if on every turn your reaction to the story isn't "Wow, neat" but "Nobody could be that stupid!", the writers have failed abysmally.
It's sad, really. The basic story isn't bad, and could've made for a fun and exciting flick... if the writers weren't seemingly going out of their way to make the viewer laugh and/or cry at the ludicrous details.
Why? Why do people try to write science fiction and then not even bother trying to learn at even the most basic about their chosen subject? It's a lament that's as old as movies, I suppose; still, "Space Cowboys" is one of the more egregious examples. Evidently they had a decent budget; they could have spent a little on research.
I could trot out miscellaneous stupidities like: 1000 miles is not geosynchronous orbit; 1000 miles is a ludicrous place to put a satellite; the Shuttle cannot fly to anywhere near 1000 miles up; a satellite in geosynchronous orbit will (essentially) never decay into the atmosphere; and so forth.
You'd deride me as a nerdish wet blanket, I suppose. But more fundamentally, the level of stupidity this movie ascribes to practically everyone is stratospheric. The very concept of NASA putting four rookies with a month of training onto a shuttle and sending that shuttle to rendezvous with and grapple a satellite ABOUT WHICH VIRTUALLY NOTHING IS KNOWN (like the design, even the mass) is about as far removed from reality as can be imagined. There isn't even a pretense of building a willing suspension of disbelief. And if on every turn your reaction to the story isn't "Wow, neat" but "Nobody could be that stupid!", the writers have failed abysmally.