Neil deGrasse Tyson tore into the new blockbuster with a series of tweets. An example:
Marsha Ivins, an astronaut, had mixed feelings about the movie:
I can almost forgive the liberal use of artistic license in violating the laws of physics because they got some things very right. The views of the Earth and the sunrise, the lighting on Sandra Bullock’s face (light in space is so different from light in the atmosphere)—perfect. Her body positions inside the spacecraft, the astronauts’ tether protocol during the space walks, the breathing in the helmet, even the real life, excruciatingly slow movement of the Soyuz undocking from the Space Station—spot on. These things made me happy.
The massive, fatal, horrific, total destruction of every single spacecraft? Not so much.
I guess I take spacecraft destruction personally, movie or not. For me, it’s just too hard to watch. The scene in which debris is falling through the atmosphere, breaking up into streaking balls of white finality brought slamming back to mind the real life image burned there forever of the last moments of the Columbia Shuttle. And I had to look away.
Scott Parazynski, another astronaut, gives the movie much higher marks. On the reality of space debris:
[W]e have taken lots of orbital debris. In fact, every shuttle flight that we flew, there would be dings on the windows, as well as to the Shuttle’s tiles. I actually have experience seeing debris damage when floating by a radiator panel. I was at the very tip of the space station; it was a much larger piece of debris, but it went all the way through the panel, and it looked like a bullet had been shot through it. There were curved metal ridges that showed the spiral pattern. It was probably just a washer from a spent booster or something that ended up crossing the station’s path. These things have incredible energy. Even a fleck of paint traveling at those kinds of speeds could wreak havoc for a space walker.
More Dish on the dangers of space debris here. Meanwhile, in the following video from Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón and re-recording mixer Skip Lievsay, the latter discusses how they “split the difference in terms of the science” between the need for sound effects and the lack of air (and thus sound) in space, relying heavily on the vibrations that the astronauts would hear through their spacesuits:
SoundWorks Collection: The Sound of Gravity from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.
The Dish 