Retired astronaut and engineer Chris Hadfield uses his NASA experience and vast knowledge of outer space to fact check notable space movies, including 'For All Mankind,' 'Top Gun: Maverick,' 'Life,' 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,' 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon,' 'F9: The Fast Saga,' 'Space Cowboys', 'Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi' and more.
"The Defector" by Chris Hadfield will publish on October 10. https://chrishadfield.ca/books/the-defector/
Director: Frank Cosgriff
Director of Photography: Kevin Dynia
Editor: Cory Stevens
Producer: Madison Coffey
Associate Producer: Rafael Vasquez
Associate Talent Manager: Paige Garbarini
Camera Operator: Chloe Ramos
Audio Engineer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ziyne Abdo
Post Production Supervisor: Edward Taylor
Post Production Coordinator: Jovan James
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds
"The Defector" by Chris Hadfield will publish on October 10. https://chrishadfield.ca/books/the-defector/
Director: Frank Cosgriff
Director of Photography: Kevin Dynia
Editor: Cory Stevens
Producer: Madison Coffey
Associate Producer: Rafael Vasquez
Associate Talent Manager: Paige Garbarini
Camera Operator: Chloe Ramos
Audio Engineer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Ziyne Abdo
Post Production Supervisor: Edward Taylor
Post Production Coordinator: Jovan James
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 - Lopez, keep her covered.
00:01 - Roger.
00:02 - Switching frequencies.
00:04 - How come the suits are all floppy and loose?
00:07 Suits are pressurized.
00:08 I mean, you've probably made a balloon animal.
00:10 It's really hard to twist it.
00:12 Gets hard as nails.
00:13 And yet their suits are like they just put on some costumes
00:16 and walked onto the set.
00:17 Hi, I'm Chris Hadfield, astronaut, fighter pilot,
00:21 test pilot, and I've been really looking forward to this.
00:23 Today we're gonna be reviewing space movies
00:26 from an astronaut's perspective.
00:28 This is "For All Mankind."
00:30 - Webster, take point.
00:32 Get on that frig until he's got to get lost.
00:35 Lopez, keep her covered.
00:36 - Roger.
00:37 - There is so much wrong there
00:39 that it's just excruciating to watch.
00:41 The idea of an alternative history
00:43 where the Soviets with Alexei Leonov
00:46 were the first to land on the moon,
00:47 I really think it's a clever possibility for plots.
00:51 But very soon, just a few episodes in,
00:55 everything became sort of cartoonish.
00:57 - They're moving.
00:58 [speaking in foreign language]
01:00 - I got it.
01:01 [speaking in foreign language]
01:02 - Stay cool, guys.
01:03 - It sounds like a bunch of actors sitting around a table
01:06 pretending to be soldiers.
01:08 Take point and sound off.
01:10 How come nobody on the American team,
01:11 not one, speaks a word of Russian?
01:14 They knew there were gonna be Russians there.
01:15 I used to be a combat fighter pilot
01:17 with an armed F-18 intercepting Soviet bombers
01:19 in the Cold War.
01:20 These are ostensibly trained astronauts and Marines.
01:25 That's not how anybody's gonna behave,
01:27 especially when the stakes are that high.
01:29 They recognize the incredible seriousness
01:32 of shooting a Soviet or Russian.
01:35 You're gonna have to be absolutely sure
01:38 that there was a threat.
01:39 - Is that a gun?
01:41 Stop!
01:42 Step away from the case!
01:44 [grunting]
01:46 - I write thriller fiction,
01:52 and in my book "The Apollo Murders,"
01:54 there's a gun on the moon.
01:55 So I did a lot of research for how would a gun work
01:59 on the surface of the moon?
02:00 Guns don't need air to work.
02:02 Lack of air would be better
02:04 because then there'd be no air to slow down the bullet,
02:06 and there's a lot less gravity on the moon,
02:08 so the bullet would go straighter and further,
02:11 especially a great big high-powered rifle like that.
02:13 You'd hardly even need to aim.
02:15 It would go absolutely dead straight,
02:16 especially for the short distances they were firing them.
02:19 - Jesus, this guy's on fire.
02:22 - It's 100% oxygen inside a spacesuit,
02:26 so everything burns.
02:27 We have had a fire inside a spacewalking suit.
02:31 It was in test at the Johnson Space Center in Houston,
02:34 and even the aluminum was burning inside the suit.
02:37 Fortunately, there was not a person in the suit.
02:39 You don't want any sparks to be even possible
02:43 inside a 100% oxygen environment.
02:46 This movie is "Top Gun Maverick."
02:48 - Control, this is Dark Star.
02:49 How do you read?
02:50 - Dark Star, control, loud and clear.
02:52 - How mean?
02:53 - Loud and clear.
02:54 Takeoff pre-check complete.
02:55 Ready for APU start.
02:56 - Ready lift engine start.
02:59 [engine roaring]
03:01 Ready right engine start.
03:02 - I love this movie.
03:05 I do not know of a better pilot flying movie
03:08 that has ever been made.
03:10 Kudos to the people that made this film,
03:12 and especially to Tom Cruise.
03:14 That scene at the end where Tom's flying a P-51 Mustang,
03:18 that's Tom's Mustang.
03:19 Like, he's a real pilot.
03:21 There's a delightful little touch
03:22 that Tom Cruise stuck in here,
03:24 when as he's taxiing out to takeoff,
03:25 he says, "I have information alpha."
03:27 - Go, this is Dark Star.
03:28 We are taxiing with information alpha.
03:31 - What that means is he's listened to the recording
03:34 that tells what the weather is and what runway is active.
03:37 So the tower doesn't have to repeat it to him.
03:39 It didn't need to be in the movie, but it's real,
03:41 and I just love that it's in there.
03:43 - Aye, sweetheart.
03:45 One last ride.
03:46 [engine roaring]
03:50 - When I was a test pilot,
03:52 I worked on the engines that are used in this scene.
03:56 I had the very first scramjet
03:58 mounted on the wingtip of my F-18,
04:00 and we managed to get it to light,
04:02 burning hydrogen and ambient oxygen.
04:05 - Lock 8.8.
04:07 8.9.
04:09 Lock nine.
04:11 - He's the fastest man alive.
04:13 - Did he say, "fastest man alive"?
04:18 I'm an astronaut.
04:20 I've gone Mach 25.
04:21 - Come on!
04:23 - He gets up to Mach 10, and he just can't help himself.
04:32 He's got to go a little bit faster.
04:34 - Oh, don't do it.
04:36 - When I was flying an F-18,
04:37 when we were doing engine testing,
04:39 we would take it up almost 40,000 feet
04:41 and just under Mach 2, pretty fast for an F-18.
04:44 So what would you do if you were at 40,000 feet
04:47 and just about Mach 2?
04:48 I would pull back on the stick and go up.
04:50 And each time I got a little more confident,
04:52 a little more brazen,
04:53 and pushing the envelope even further up to 62,000 feet,
04:57 way higher than an F-18 is supposed to fly.
05:00 It's sort of in the nature of a test pilot,
05:03 but it's tempered by, okay, how far could I push this?
05:06 And you could see Tom doing that.
05:08 If I made it to Mach 10, then 10.1,
05:11 you know, it's such a little change, it'll be all right.
05:13 In reality, that wouldn't have wrecked the vehicle.
05:15 A few more tenths of Mach, the vehicle wouldn't know.
05:18 [engine revving]
05:21 High-speed ejections are not pretty.
05:28 I mean, they often kill the pilot.
05:30 And so for the airplanes that fly really fast,
05:32 they actually have an ejection pod.
05:35 The whole front of the airplane ejects or separates.
05:39 And so if you had a problem where the vehicle was breaking up
05:42 you could eject and that whole escape pod
05:44 would separate from the vehicle
05:46 and come down under a parachute.
05:47 The fact that Tom Cruise somehow survives this breakup,
05:50 I think it means that in this SR-72 Dark Star,
05:55 they must have had an escape pod.
05:57 This is life.
05:59 [upbeat music]
06:02 I was emailing actually back and forth with Ryan Reynolds
06:09 while he was filming this.
06:10 The weightlessness is actually done really well.
06:12 He was working really hard on that.
06:14 He wanted to make it look realistic.
06:16 It's pretty convincing.
06:17 They did a nice job of that.
06:18 But the fundamental idea is just so far-fetched.
06:22 It just makes me wince.
06:24 Sorry, Ryan.
06:25 - Suggestions?
06:28 - Get an oxygen candle.
06:30 - Okay, cool.
06:31 An oxygen candle, that's not a bad idea.
06:32 An oxygen candle is this canister,
06:35 looks like a small beer keg.
06:36 And it's got a certain chemical in it
06:38 that if you heat up one end,
06:40 the chemical reaction releases great amounts of oxygen.
06:44 It's kind of like an emergency oxygen supply.
06:46 He smashes it against a handrail.
06:48 And you hear glass tinkling.
06:51 Imagine what shards of glass would be like without gravity.
06:54 You don't have glass on board a spaceship.
06:57 It's not an oxygen candle.
06:58 It's like, touch him with the 100 watt light bulb.
07:01 - Any suggestions?
07:03 - What about the incinerator?
07:04 - I like that.
07:05 All right, genius.
07:06 Here, manual over.
07:08 - All right, thank you.
07:11 - That's a flamethrower inside a spaceship.
07:16 One of the worst things that can happen
07:17 on a space station is fire.
07:19 It's one of the three big emergencies on a spaceship.
07:22 A puncture where you're depressurizing,
07:24 a contaminated atmosphere that you can't breathe anymore,
07:27 and a fire.
07:28 You wanna have no chance at all
07:29 of an open flame happening on board a spaceship.
07:32 The space station is festooned with smoke alarms.
07:34 But here we have Rory
07:37 filling the entire spaceship with flame,
07:41 not one alarm goes off.
07:43 [alarm blaring]
07:46 They are not doing their job at all.
07:48 But what an interesting alien.
07:50 Completely different, looks sort of like
07:51 a little self-propelled jellyfish, starfish kind of thing.
07:54 There's no reason to think that life on Mars
07:57 would have evolved exactly the same way it would on Earth.
08:01 If we do find alien life somewhere else,
08:03 we have to expect it to be radically different than us.
08:06 It's gonna think differently.
08:07 It's going to have a different set of objectives.
08:10 It might live in an entirely different environment than us.
08:13 One of the cool recent discoveries
08:15 is that every star has a planet.
08:17 We can count stars, and we can count galaxies.
08:20 So suddenly, we have a rough idea
08:23 of how many planets there are in the universe.
08:25 It's at least septillion planets,
08:28 which is such a huge number, it's essentially infinite.
08:31 So with 14 billion years and an infinite number of planets,
08:35 there's gotta be life out there in the universe.
08:38 We're researching, we're exploring the universe,
08:40 but so far, the only life we have ever seen is from Earth.
08:45 This is "Guardians of the Galaxy," volume three.
08:49 Our best guess is that you can live outside of a spaceship
09:00 without a spacesuit for 30 seconds, really no problem.
09:04 But beyond about a minute and a half,
09:06 there's gonna be stuff happens to you
09:08 that does permanent, irreversible, and deathly damage.
09:12 90 seconds, and you're a satellite.
09:15 Within about 15 seconds,
09:17 all the oxygen that is in your blood
09:19 will have now come through your lungs the other way,
09:22 and you will have breathed it out.
09:23 So in about 15 seconds,
09:25 you have blood without enough oxygen in it,
09:27 and when it gets up to your brain, you'll go unconscious.
09:30 You can see his face swelling up, that's real.
09:33 If you popped your helmet off in space,
09:35 sure, your lungs would sort of collapse,
09:37 but also, your blood would fizz,
09:40 like opening a can of Coke and release the pressure,
09:42 and suddenly there's bubbles in your blood
09:45 and in your cheeks and in all of your flesh,
09:47 and you're gonna swell up,
09:48 not as much as he's swelling up here.
09:50 Suddenly, he's got frost on his face.
09:52 It wouldn't happen like that.
09:53 There's no water on your face.
09:56 It's not gonna instantaneously freeze.
09:58 You got a lot of thermal mass.
10:00 It's like sticking a big roast in the freezer.
10:03 You know, it doesn't instantaneously freeze.
10:05 It takes a while.
10:06 Most of the stuff that's happening inside your body,
10:08 but it's really hard to show that to the movie audience,
10:11 so that's why they sort of exaggerated
10:13 what's happening to his face.
10:14 I think it would have been better
10:15 if this had happened to Groot.
10:16 I think Groot would have just flown out of that one ship
10:19 and gone, "Groot," and then been on board the other ship
10:22 and, you know, wouldn't have been any big deal.
10:24 - Neil, you are dark on the rock.
10:26 - This is "Transformers, Dark of the Moon."
10:29 - You have 21 minutes.
10:30 [dramatic music]
10:34 [radio static]
10:36 - They changed the purpose
10:38 of the very first human moon landing, Apollo 11,
10:41 to land next to this crashed alien ship.
10:45 Of the 135 space shuttle flights,
10:48 11 of them were classified,
10:50 and the stuff that was going on was not broadcast.
10:53 They were doing stuff for the Department of Defense,
10:56 and everything was at some level of security and secrecy.
11:00 If we were taking up one of the military's payloads
11:04 or doing experiments on behalf of the military,
11:06 then that would be a classified mission,
11:08 and the public wouldn't hear a thing,
11:10 just like is shown here in the "Transformers" movie.
11:13 I have to clarify one thing.
11:14 There is no dark side of the moon.
11:16 The moon rotates as it goes around the sun,
11:19 so a day on the moon lasts about two weeks,
11:22 and sometimes the other side of the moon,
11:24 it's in the bright light,
11:25 so it really shouldn't be called the dark side of the moon.
11:28 It should just be called the other side of the moon.
11:31 - We are not alone after all, are we?
11:34 - No, sir, we're not alone.
11:36 - I've been around pilots my whole life.
11:38 I was an astronaut for 21 years,
11:40 and no one, no one that I have ever met
11:43 has ever seen a UFO.
11:46 It's fun to think about.
11:47 There's a lot of people that think it's worth looking into.
11:49 That's fine.
11:50 I hope we do find evidence,
11:51 even one little fossil on Mars.
11:54 That'll be quite a revelation
11:56 the next time you look up at the stars to realize,
11:59 hey, we finally have proof that we're not alone,
12:02 but we're not there yet.
12:04 This is "The Expanse."
12:06 - I'm sorry the gravity of a real planet hurts,
12:09 but it's appropriate.
12:11 You wish to hurt Earth,
12:13 the Earth that is now crushing your weak,
12:17 belter lungs and your fragile, better bones.
12:21 - I really like "The Expanse."
12:23 It just sort of extrapolates where we are now,
12:26 the type of things we're doing, our technology,
12:28 the way we behave, and takes that out into the future.
12:31 And how is it gonna change the fundamental nature
12:34 of human life itself to be multi-planetary?
12:37 What would it be like to be a miner on an asteroid?
12:40 What if you'd been born without gravity?
12:45 How would your body develop?
12:46 The belter in this scene was born and raised
12:49 somewhere besides Earth.
12:50 Sex in space, as far as I know, never happened yet,
12:54 but eventually there will be sex in space,
12:57 and eventually it will lead to conception.
12:59 We do not know if a human being,
13:01 right from birth through adulthood,
13:04 can properly develop anywhere but Earth.
13:06 The muscles, the density of the bones,
13:08 the interplay between your balance system and your eyes,
13:12 it would evolve differently.
13:14 All the little ligatures and the musculatures,
13:17 they would all be wildly different
13:19 if you didn't have the constant weight-lifting task
13:23 of living on Earth while your body was forming itself.
13:26 And it may be that if we are born somewhere besides Earth,
13:30 we can never come back to Earth.
13:32 I don't think it's correct
13:33 that suddenly everyone would get taller.
13:35 Our height is driven by our genetics.
13:38 Taller people give birth to taller children.
13:41 I think if you look at his body here,
13:43 it's pretty representative.
13:45 He looks wimpy, looks flaccid.
13:47 It looks like a body that hasn't been fighting gravity.
13:50 For someone who's never lived under gravity,
13:53 it'd be like tying hundreds of pounds of weight to your body
13:56 and like being on the rack, sort of,
13:58 and having to put up with it just by gravity itself.
14:01 When I returned to Earth from my third space flight,
14:04 I'd been in space for almost half a year.
14:05 Getting used to gravity again,
14:07 even for someone who was born and raised on Earth,
14:10 was really hard.
14:11 My heart had shrunk.
14:12 My balance system had completely adapted
14:14 to not having gravity.
14:16 So suddenly I was super dizzy and couldn't focus.
14:20 And if I tip my head back, I could have sworn
14:22 I was doing back flips,
14:24 just because I had adapted to a different gravity field
14:29 than the one we have on Earth.
14:30 I'd forgotten that your lips and your tongue have weight.
14:33 It was so weird when I started talking back on Earth.
14:36 I was like, "What the heck is going on?
14:38 "My tongue is being pushed to the bottom of my mouth."
14:41 You know, it's just,
14:42 even the little subtle things were different.
14:44 So imagine what it would be like
14:46 if you'd never been here before.
14:48 - Hunter! - Go, Trent!
14:51 - This is "F9," the "Fast" saga.
14:53 - Oh my God!
14:54 I don't want to die!
14:56 - Ignition!
14:57 [gunshots]
14:59 - Like a billion other people on Earth,
15:03 I really like the "Fast and Furious" series.
15:06 It's just almost just purely a cartoon,
15:08 but unavoidably fun to follow and watch it.
15:11 They launch off the back of that airplane,
15:12 that big, like, it's like a C-141, but with two engines.
15:15 Their engines fire, and now they're rocking into space.
15:17 And like 30 seconds later, they're in orbit.
15:19 It took me eight and a half minutes.
15:21 So they really went fast.
15:23 You know, they were getting crushed.
15:25 This is a 1984 Pontiac Fiero flying in space.
15:33 - Tell me you know how to work the thrusters.
15:35 - Tez, numbers is what you do, right?
15:38 Driving is what I do.
15:42 - I haven't driven a Fiero in a while,
15:44 but I've flown some rocket ships,
15:45 and they don't actually have a transmission that you shift.
15:48 That's not how rocket ships work, but it's okay.
15:51 I understand it.
15:51 It's a Fiero.
15:52 What else are you gonna do?
15:53 But I love the scene when those two guys,
15:56 and you see it reflected in their visors,
15:58 are suddenly actually seeing Earth from space.
16:01 The beauty of that and the wonder of it,
16:03 that they're emoting there, it feels just like that.
16:07 Suddenly, all of the blue is below you.
16:09 You're out in the eternal blackness,
16:11 and all of life is laid out there
16:13 on this beautiful, curving arc of the world under them.
16:16 And I'm really pleased that they put that into the movie
16:19 and then portrayed it so well.
16:21 This movie is "Space Cowboys."
16:24 - First one to pass out buys a beer tonight.
16:26 - Get on.
16:27 - This thing moving?
16:34 - I don't know.
16:37 Doesn't seem to be moving to me.
16:39 - The life of an astronaut is one of simulation.
16:45 I served as an astronaut for 21 years.
16:47 I was in space for six months.
16:49 So for 20 and a half years,
16:52 I trained and prepared and simulated
16:54 and got ready for space flight.
16:56 And one of the things we did was fly a centrifuge.
16:59 A centrifuge is just a little cockpit
17:02 on the end of a long arm, and you spin it.
17:04 And by spinning it, you can sort of get extra force
17:07 on your body, like you're a ball on the end of a string.
17:09 - You're a pushover, Frank!
17:13 - You know, I do believe it's moving.
17:15 - The purpose of a centrifuge
17:16 is not to make the astronauts black out.
17:20 The maximum G-load that the shuttle pulled was three.
17:23 Three times the gravity that you're feeling right now.
17:26 And you don't have to spin your centrifuge that fast
17:29 to get up to 3G.
17:30 The G-force that they're subjecting themselves to
17:33 in this clip is completely unrealistic.
17:36 When they show that sped-up video
17:38 of that centrifuge spinning,
17:40 the guys would have been turned to jello
17:42 on the floor of the centrifuge.
17:43 The whole centrifuge would have come apart
17:45 spinning that fast.
17:46 And yet, there's Tommy Lee and Clint sitting there,
17:49 and for some reason, they're both leaning to the left.
17:51 If you suddenly weigh 15 times normal,
17:54 you wanna sit straight, upright,
17:56 so all this huge weight of your head
17:59 being crushed by the centrifuge
18:00 is being supported by your spine.
18:02 If they went over like that,
18:03 they'd just crumple like an accordion,
18:05 you know, down onto their left hip.
18:06 A lot of astronauts,
18:07 especially early on in the shuttle era,
18:09 they were military fighter pilot test pilots,
18:13 because you need those skills.
18:14 You have to have gotten the university degrees,
18:16 had all that thousands of hours of flying,
18:19 and practiced and simulated and learned
18:21 so that you can go do something with an airplane
18:23 nobody ever did before.
18:24 But we are not thrill-seekers.
18:27 We're not adrenaline junkies.
18:29 We are definitely not cowboys.
18:31 You need careful and thoughtful and well-trained
18:35 and disciplined and teamwork-oriented people.
18:39 Otherwise, you're all gonna die.
18:40 But, you know, it's "Space Cowboys,"
18:42 so, you know, saddle up.
18:45 Let's ride this Bronco.
18:46 - Break off the attack.
18:48 The shield is still up.
18:49 - This is "Return of the Jedi."
18:52 - Pull up, all craft, pull up.
18:54 [dramatic music]
18:57 - "Star Wars" was a revelation
19:01 when it first came to the screen in the late 1970s.
19:03 To recognize just how groundbreaking
19:05 all of this technology was,
19:07 to be able to have these visuals.
19:09 As a fighter pilot, I mean, you're just,
19:11 your head is on a swivel
19:13 'cause the threat is all around you,
19:15 and it's above you, and it's below you.
19:17 And these guys are always just looking straight ahead.
19:20 They never look down.
19:21 They don't roll their ship upside down to see.
19:23 Everybody just sort of magically knows
19:25 what everybody else is doing all the time.
19:26 The Admiral, he's sitting there in an easy chair
19:29 in front of a bay window, somehow directing the fight.
19:32 I mean, the distances in space are huge.
19:35 Things are tens or twenties of miles away from him.
19:38 Then how about everything that's happening behind him?
19:41 - It's a trap!
19:42 - Space is disorienting, just by its very nature.
19:46 I mean, which direction is up
19:47 if you're floating through space?
19:49 It's completely arbitrary.
19:51 And if you're gonna talk to somebody else,
19:53 the two of you have to establish a common reference frame.
19:56 Like you could say, "Away from the Earth,"
19:58 or "Away from this planet."
19:59 But you've gotta get some sort of reference frame
20:03 that the two of you share.
20:05 Otherwise, your communications to each other
20:08 are just gonna be meaningless.
20:09 But this is "Star Wars."
20:11 I don't wanna critique it for its technical accuracy.
20:15 It was a huge, new, exciting way
20:18 to experience the rest of the universe,
20:20 and I still feel that way.
20:22 When I was a kid, it was stories and movies
20:25 and television shows that allowed me to see things
20:28 that didn't exist yet, to imagine stuff,
20:30 to dream of doing things that directly led to my life
20:34 as a fighter pilot and a test pilot and an astronaut.
20:37 It's lovely that we have this huge volume
20:40 of stories being told, these great images,
20:43 our ability to imagine stuff,
20:45 to allow us to explore things that are still impossible,
20:47 because a lot of the things that are in these movies,
20:50 they're just only impossible right now.
20:52 These are things that we might be able to do in the future.
20:54 So it's been a lot of fun reviewing them,
20:56 but I'm really more interested in the reality
20:59 of what people are gonna do in the future
21:01 as the result of ever being inspired by these movies.
21:04 (explosion)