Wendy Lawrence calls movie ‘Gravity’ unrealistic
On Thursday, NASA astronaut Wendy Lawrence landed in the Stuff.co.nz office and answered everything about space travel.
The 55-year-old said the whole premise for the movie Gravity is unrealistic. Lawrence has gone
into space four times. She is an engineer and former helicopter pilot and joined NASA in 1992.
She completed a year of flight training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas to qualify as a mission specialist. She was also the mission specialist in 2005 on the first shuttle mission since the Columbia disaster in 2003. Seven crew members were killed when the shuttle disintegrated during re-entry.
According to Lawrence, space is more like the movie Apollo 13 than Interstellar. She said, "I watched Interstellar on the flight over, I'll probably watch it again on the flight back, and I'm still not really sure about it. I'll have to ponder that some more”.
She said that blowing up of one satellite could take out all the other satellites with the space debris and it just doesn't work that way based on the laws of quantum mechanics.
However, she mentioned that Apollo 13 was one of the more realistic space movies. She said she never got bored in space. One night on her mission to the Russian space station they sang a lot of Beatles songs.
She also told about space toilets and mentioned that a toilet in space is much like a vacuum cleaner. It sucks up material into a bag that is brought back to earth to be disposed of.