Astronaut Chris Hadfield Reviews Aerospace Movies (Top Gun Maverick, GOTG & More)

[Astronaut 1] Lopez, keep her covered.

[Lopez] Roger.

[Webster] Switching frequencies.

How come the suits are all floppy and loose?

Suits are pressurized.

I mean, you've probably made a balloon animal.

It's really hard to twist it.

Gets hard as nails, and yet their suits are like

they just put on some costumes

and walked onto the set.

Hi, I'm Chris Hadfield,

astronaut, fighter pilot, test pilot,

and I've been really looking forward to this.

Today we're gonna be reviewing space movies

from an astronaut's perspective.

This is For All Mankind.

[Actor] Webster, take point.

Get on their freq' and tell these guys to get lost.

Lopez, keep her covered.

[Lopez] Roger.

There is so much wrong there

that it's just excruciating to watch.

The idea of an alternative history

where the Soviets with Alexei Leonov

were the first to land on the moon.

I really think it's a clever possibility for plots

but it very soon just a few episodes in,

everything became sort of cartoonish.

[speaking Russian on radio]

[Webster] I got 'em.

[Astronaut 1] Stay cool guys.

It sounds like a bunch of actors

sitting around a table pretending to be soldiers.

Take point and sound off.

How come nobody on the American team, not one,

speaks a word of Russian?

They knew there were gonna be Russians there.

I used to be a combat fighter pilot

with an armed F-18 intercepting Soviet bombers

in the Cold War.

These are ostensibly trained astronauts and marines.

That's not how anybody's gonna behave,

especially when the stakes are that high.

They recognize the incredible seriousness

of shooting a Soviet, a Russian.

You're gonna have to be absolutely sure

that there was a threat.

Is that a gun? Stop.

Step away from the case.

[grunts]

I write thriller fiction,

and in my book, The Apollo Murders,

there's a gun on the moon.

So I did a lot of research

for how would a gun work

on the surface of the moon.

Guns don't need air to work.

Lack of air would be better

because then there'd be no air

to slow down the bullet

and there's a lot less gravity on the moon.

So the bullet would go straighter and further,

especially a great big, high powered rifle like that.

You'd hardly even need to aim.

It would go absolutely dead straight,

especially for the short distances they were firing them.

Jesus, this guy's on fire.

It's a hundred percent oxygen

inside a spacesuit, so everything burns.

We have had a fire inside a spacewalking suit.

It was in test at the Johnson Space Center in Houston

and even the aluminum was burning inside the suit.

Fortunately, there was not a person in the suit.

You don't want any sparks to be even possible

inside a hundred percent oxygen environment.

This movie is Top Gun: Maverick.

[Darkstar] Control, this is Dark Star.

How do you read?

Dark Star, Control. Loud and clear, how me?

Loud and clear. Take off pre-check's complete.

Ready for APU start.

Ready left engine start.

[shuttle engine fires up]

Ready right engine start.

[shuttle engine roars]

I love this movie.

I do not know of a better pilot flying movie

that has ever been made.

Kudos to the people that made this film,

and especially to Tom Cruise.

That scene at the end,

where Tom's flying a P51 Mustang.

That's Tom's Mustang.

Like he's a real pilot.

There's a delightful little touch

that Tom Cruise stuck in here.

When as he's taxiing out to takeoff,

he says, I have information Alpha.

Con, this is Darkstar.

We are taxiing with information, Alpha.

What that means is he's listened to the,

the recording that tells what the weather is

and what runway is active,

so the tower doesn't have to repeat it to him.

It didn't need to be in the movie, but it's real.

And, and I just love that it's in there.

Nice sweetheart.

One last ride.

[engine revs up]

When I was a test pilot

I worked on the engines that are used in, in this scene.

I had the very first scramjet mounted

on the wing tip of my F-18, and we managed to get it

to light burning hydrogen and ambient oxygen.

Mach 8.8, 8.9, Mach nine.

He's the fastest man alive.

Did he say fastest man alive?

I'm an astronaut.

I've gone Mach 25.

Come on.

[afterburners blaze]

He gets up to Mach 10 and he just can't help himself.

He's got to go a little bit faster.

Oh, don't do it.

When I was flying an F-18,

when we were doing engine testing,

we would take it up almost 40,000 feet

and just under Mach two, pretty fast for an F18.

So what would you do if you were at 40,000 feet

and just above Mach two?

I would pull back on the stick and go up

and each time I got a little more confident,

a little more brazen

and pushing the envelope even further up to 62,000 feet.

Way higher than an F-18 is supposed to fly.

It's sort of in the nature of a test pilot

but it's tempered by, okay, how far can I push this?

And you could see Tom doing that.

If I made it to Mach 10, then 10.1, you know

it's such a little change, it'll be all right.

In reality, that wouldn't have wrecked the vehicle.

A few more tenths of Mach, the vehicle wouldn't know.

[alarm blares]

Oh shit.

[shuttle collapsing]

High speed ejections are not pretty.

I mean, they often kill the pilot.

And so for the airplanes that fly really fast

they actually have an ejection pod.

The whole front of the airplane ejects or separates.

And so, if you had a problem

where the vehicle was breaking up

you could eject and that whole escape pod,

would separate from the vehicle

and come down under a parachute.

The fact that Tom Cruise somehow survives this breakup,

I think it means that in this SR-72 Darkstar,

they must have had an escape pod.

This is Life.

[alert sounds]

[airlock decompresses]

I was emailing actually back and forth

with Ryan Reynolds while he was filming this.

The weightlessness is actually done really well.

He was working really hard on that.

He wanted to make it look realistic.

It's pretty convincing.

They did a nice job of that.

But the fundamental idea is just so farfetched.

It just makes me wince.

Sorry, Ryan.

Suggestions.

Get an oxygen candle.

Okay, cool.

An oxygen candle.

That's not a bad idea.

An oxygen candle is this canister,

looks like a small beer keg,

and it's got a certain chemical in it

that if you heat up one end

the chemical reaction releases great amounts of oxygen.

It's kind of like an emergency oxygen supply.

He smashes it against a handrail

[glass shatters]

and you hear glass tinkling.

Imagine what shards of glass would be like without gravity.

You, you don't have glass on board a spaceship.

It's not an oxygen candle.

It's like, touch 'em with the hundred watt light bulb.

[Rory] Any suggestions?

What about the incinerator?

I like that.

Alright, genius, here.

Manual override.

Thank you.

That's a flamethrower inside a spaceship.

One of the worst things that can happen

on a space station is fire.

It's one of the three big emergencies on a spaceship.

A puncture where you're depressurizing,

a contaminated atmosphere that you can't breathe anymore,

and a fire.

You want to have no chance at all

of an open flame happening onboard a spaceship.

The space station is festooned with smoke alarms

but here we have Rory filling the entire spaceship

with flame.

Not one alarm goes off.

They are not doing their job at all.

But what an interesting alien.

Completely different.

Looks sort of like a little self-propelled jellyfish,

starfish kind of thing.

There's no reason to think that life on Mars

would have evolved exactly the same way it would on earth.

If we do find alien life somewhere else

we have to expect it to be radically different than us.

It's gonna think differently.

It's going to have a different set of objectives.

It might live in an entirely different environment than us.

One of the cool recent discoveries is

that every star has a planet.

We can count stars and we can count galaxies.

So suddenly we have a rough idea

of how many planets there are in the universe.

It's at least septillion planets

which is such a huge number.

It's essentially infinite.

So with 14 billion years and an infinite number of planets

there's gotta be life out there in the universe.

We're researching, we're exploring the universe,

but so far the only life we have ever seen is from Earth.

This is Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume three.

Our best guess is that you can live outside of a spaceship

without a space suit for 30 seconds, really no problem.

But beyond about a minute and a half

there's gonna be stuff happens to you that does permanent

irreversible and deathly damage.

90 seconds and you're a satellite.

Within about 15 seconds, all the oxygen that is

in your blood will have now come

through your lungs the other way

and you will have breathed it out.

So in about 15 seconds

you have blood without enough oxygen in it

and when it gets up to your brain, you'll go unconscious.

You can see his face swelling up.

That's real.

If you popped your helmet off in space,

sure your lungs would, would sort of collapse,

but also your blood would fizz like opening a can of Coke

and release the pressure and suddenly there's bubbles

in your blood and in your cheeks

and in all of your flesh, and you're gonna swell out.

Not as much as he's swelling up here.

Suddenly he's got frost on his face.

It wouldn't happen like that.

There's no water on your face.

It's not going to instantaneously freeze.

You got a lot of thermal mass.

It's like sticking a, a big roast in the freezer.

You know, it doesn't instantaneously freeze.

It takes a while.

Most of the stuff that's happening inside your body

but it's really hard to show that to the movie audience.

So that's why they sort of exaggerated

what's happening to his face.

I think it would've been better

if this had happened to Groot.

I think Groot would've just like flown outta that one ship

and gone Groot and then been on board the other ship

and you know, wouldn't have been any big deal.

Neil, you are dark on the rock.

This is, Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

We have 21 minutes.

[ominous anticipatory music]

They changed the purpose

of the very first human moon landing, Apollo 11,

to land next to this crashed alien ship

of the hundred and 35 space shuttle flights.

11 of them were classified

and the stuff that was going on was not broadcast.

They were doing stuff for the Department of Defense

and everything was at some level of security and secrecy.

If we were taking up one of the military's payloads

or doing experiments on behalf of the military,

then that would be a classified mission

and the public wouldn't hear a thing,

just like was shown here in the Transformers movie.

I have to clarify one thing.

There is no dark side of the moon.

The moon rotates as it goes around the sun.

So a day on the moon lasts about two weeks

and sometimes the other side of the moon

it's in the bright light,

So it really shouldn't be called the dark side of the moon.

It should just be called the other side of the moon.

We are not alone after all, are we?

No sir, we're not alone.

I've been around pilots my whole life.

I was an astronaut for 21 years and no one,

no one that I have ever met, has ever seen a UFO.

It's fun to think about.

There's a lot of people that think it's worth looking into.

That's fine. I hope we do find evidence.

Even one little fossil, you know, on Mars.

That that'll be quite a revelation

when next time you look up at the stars to realize,

hey, we finally have proof that we're not alone

but we're not there yet.

This is, The Expanse.

I'm sorry, the gravity of a real planet hurts

but it's appropriate.

You wish to hurt earth.

The earth that is now crushing your weak, Belter lungs

and your fragile, Belter bones.

I really like, The Expanse.

It just sort of extrapolates where we are now.

The type of things we're doing, our technology

the way we behave and takes that out into the future.

And how is it gonna change the fundamental nature

of human life itself to be multi-planetary?

What would it be like to be a miner on an asteroid?

What if you'd been born without gravity?

How would your body develop?

The Belter in this scene was born and raised

somewhere besides earth.

Sex in space, as far as I know, never happened yet.

But eventually there will be sex in space

and eventually it will lead to conception.

We do not know if a human being right from birth

through adulthood can properly develop anywhere but Earth.

The muscles, the density of the bones,

the interplay between your balance system and your eyes.

It would evolve differently.

All the little ligatures and, and the musculature, you know

they would all be wildly different if you didn't

have the constant weight lifting task

of living on earth while your body was forming itself.

And it may be that if we are born somewhere besides Earth

we can never come back to Earth.

I don't think it's correct

that suddenly everyone would get taller.

Our height is driven by our genetics.

Taller people give birth to taller children.

I think if you look at his body here,

it's pretty representative.

He looks wimpy, looks flacid.

It looks like a body that hasn't been fighting gravity.

For someone who's never lived under gravity,

it'd be like tying hundreds of pounds of weight to your body

and like being on the rack sort of and having to

to put up with it just by gravity itself.

When I returned to Earth from my third space flight

I'd been in space for almost half a year.

Getting used to gravity again, even for someone who was born

and raised on earth was really hard.

My heart had shrunk.

My balance system had completely adapted

to not having gravity.

So suddenly I was super dizzy and, and couldn't focus.

And if I tipped my head back

I could have sworn I was doing back flips,

just because I had adapted to a different gravity field

than the one we have on Earth.

I'd forgotten that your lips and your tongue have weight.

It was so weird when I started talking back when--

[murmurs indistinctly]

what the heck is going on?

My tongue is being pushed to the bottom of my mouth.

You know, it just--

Even the little subtle things were different.

So imagine what it would be like

if you'd never been here before.

Push it! No, chill!

This is, F9: The Fast Saga.

Oh my God, I don't wanna die.

Like a billion other people on earth.

I really like the Fast and Furious series.

It's just almost just purely a cartoon

but unavoidably fun to follow and watch it.

They launch off the back of that airplane.

That big like, it's like a C-141, but with two engines.

Their engines fire and now they're rocking to space

and like 30 seconds later they're in orbit.

It took me eight and a half minutes.

So they really went fast, you know

they were getting crushed.

This is a 1984 Pontiac Fiero flying in space.

Tell me, you know how to work the thrusters.

Tej, numbers is what you do, right?

Driving is what I do.

I haven't driven a Fiero in a while

but I've flown some rocket ships

and they don't actually have a transmission that you shift.

That's not how rocket ships work, but it's okay.

I understand it.

It's a Fiero, what else are you gonna do?

But I love the scene when those two guys

and you see it reflected in their visors,

are suddenly, actually seeing Earth from space.

The beauty of that and the wonder of it,

that they're emoting there,

it feels just like that.

Suddenly all of the blue is below you.

You're out in the eternal blackness

and all of life is laid out there

on this beautiful curving arc of the world under them.

And I'm really pleased that they, they put that

into the movie and then portrayed it so well.

This movie is, Space Cowboys.

First one to pass out, buys a beer tonight.

You're on.

[machinery starts whirring]

This thing moving?

I dunno, it doesn't seem to be moving to me.

[whirring increases frequency]

The life of an astronaut is one of simulation.

I served as an astronaut for 21 years.

I was in space for six months.

So for 20 and a half years I trained

and prepared and simulated and got ready for space flight.

And one of the things we did was fly a centrifuge.

A centrifuge is just a little cockpit

on the end of a long arm and you spin it

and by spinning it you can sort of

get extra force on your body like you're a ball

on the end of a string.

You're a pushover, Frank.

You know, I do believe it's moving now.

The purpose of a centrifuge is not

to make the astronauts black out.

The maximum G load that the shuttle pulled was three.

Three times the gravity that you're feeling right now.

And you don't have to spin your centrifuge that fast

to get up to three g.

The G-force that they're subjecting themselves to

in this clip is completely unrealistic.

When they show that sped up video

of that centrifuge spinning,

the guys would've been turned to jello

on the floor of the centrifuge.

The whole centrifuge would've come apart spinning that fast.

And yet there's Tommy Lee and Clint sitting there

and for some reason they're both leaning to the left.

If you suddenly weigh 15 times normal

you wanna sit straight upright.

So all this huge weight of your head being crushed

by the centrifuge is being supported by your spine.

If they went over like that,

they'd just crumple like an accordion, you know,

down under their left hip.

A lot of astronauts, especially early on in the shuttle era,

they were military fighter pilot, test pilots

because you need those skills.

You have to have gotten the university degrees

had all that thousands of hours of flying and,

and practiced and simulated and learned,

so that you can go do something

with an airplane nobody ever did before.

But we are not thrill seekers.

We're not adrenaline junkies.

We are definitely not cowboys.

You need careful and thoughtful and well-trained

and disciplined and teamwork oriented people.

Otherwise you're all gonna die,

but you know, it's Space Cowboys, so, you know,

Saddle up, let's ride this bronco.

Break off the attack.

Shield is still up.

This is Return of the Jedi.

Pull up. Oh crap, pull up.

Star Wars was a revelation

when it first came to the screen in the late 1970s.

To recognize just how groundbreaking all

of this technology was.

To be able to, to have these visuals.

As a fighter pilot,

I mean, you're just, your head is on a swivel,

'cause the threat is all around you

and it's above you and it's below you.

And these guys are always just looking straight ahead.

They never look down.

They don't roll their ship upside down to see.

Everybody just sort of magically knows

what everybody else is doing all the time.

The admiral, he's sitting there in an easy chair

in front of a bay window, somehow directing the fight.

I mean, the distances in space are huge.

Things are tens or twenties of miles away from him.

And how about everything that's happening behind him?

It's a trap.

Space is disorienting just by its very nature.

I mean, which direction is up

if you're floating through space?

it's completely arbitrary.

And if you're gonna talk to somebody else,

the two of you have to establish a common reference frame.

Like you could say, away from the earth

or away from this planet,

but you've gotta get some sort of reference frame

that the two of you share.

Otherwise, your, your communications to each other

are just gonna be meaningless.

But this is Star Wars.

I don't want to, I don't want to critique it

for its technical accuracy.

It was a huge new, exciting way

to experience the rest of the universe

and I still feel that way.

When I was a kid it was stories

and movies and television shows

that allowed me to see things that didn't exist yet.

To imagine stuff, to dream of doing things

that directly led to my life as a fighter pilot

and a test pilot and an astronaut.

It's lovely that we have this huge volume

of stories being told.

These great images.

Our ability to imagine stuff

to allow us to explore things that are still impossible.

Because a lot of the things that are in these movies

they're just only impossible right now.

These are things that we might be able to do in the future.

So it's been a lot of fun reviewing them

but I'm really more interested in the reality

of what people are gonna do in the future,

as the result of having been inspired by these movies.