Airlock examples

I was going through and tagging some old posts. While looking at a post attacking the movie Sunshine, I accidentally found something else on youtube.

Gravity in Sunshine

I could not find a clip online of the scene I want, so I made a cartoon. Basically, (oh - spoiler alert) some guys are trying to get from one spaceship to another by shooting out of the airlock and into the other. They fly through space and into the other airlock, close the door and emergency pump the air in. When the closed air lock fills with air, they all fall down. Since there was no online video version, I made a cartoon.

i-06961617bdaeaeeed7ab430abadef03d-2010-04-14_airlockcomicjpg_816x283.jpg

Gravity in 2001 a Space Odyssey

Another spoiler alert - but really, if you haven't seen 2001 yet, are you going to? Well, you should. Something similar happens in this movie. Going from one airlock to another and then filling with air. Check it out.

Which one was better?

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The first is better...it's common knowledge that creating a breathable atmosphere turns on the 1g artificial gravity field.

2001 entry sequence was marvellous...the lack of sound until their was enough air and Dave's flailing around in free fall. The whole movie (apart from the whimsical end-of-movie acid trip) seemed to have got all its science right.

There was an old movie, the thieves had to steal an object in a turkish museum without touching the floor, so they pumped all the air out of the room, put on spacesuits, and then floated into the room ...

That was not "Topkapi"

@_Arthur

Wow - I am going to have to find that video. I wonder if NetFlix has it.

It was a end-of-the-70's crime movie, B series, probably european, I didn't even bother watch the whole movie. The museum robbery was just plan silly.

In all seriousness, my high school geography teacher insisted that gravity was caused by air pressure. She got really upset when I tried to correct her...

Gravity is one of those weird sci-fi geek blind spots. The world is full of assholes who'll moan endlessly about the impossibility of FTL travel, but very few complain about the fact that the gravitational field from a nearby finite plate of uniform density would be completely the wrong shape... Or that 99 times out of 100, the magic gravity keeps working even when nothing else is.

Dunc, it's not so much a blind spot, as just really hard to film any other way than at constant 1G.

By Benton Jackson (not verified) on 16 Apr 2010 #permalink