It’s one of Hollywood’s most heart-pounding depictions of fighting in space. With the shield generators aboard the second Death Star finally disabled, pilot Lando Calrissian pushes the Millennium Falcon past platoons of imperial TIE fighters and through nooks and crannies on the surface of the giant sphere to destroy its core, then speeds off as the whole thing explodes in flames behind him.
“Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,” second in the original film trilogy, represented pure good-versus-evil escapist fantasy and helped redefine blockbusters with its special effects and appealing characters. Suspend any notion of reality, each of the films advised at the outset; this action occurred “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”
Now, nearly five decades after the original “Star Wars,” outer space has been declared a warfighting domain, and nations are taking provocative action on orbit. Technical accuracy in science fiction films earns high praise today, like the survival movies “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” But while the Star Wars saga has grown to some two dozen productions, and the comic universes keep cranking out blockbusters with their superhero special operators, the real conflict emerging in space doesn’t promise much in the way of box office appeal. Blame the immutable laws of physics.
“The sober truth is that, in the real world, because of the huge size of outer space, the high velocities of spacecraft, and the lack of air, realistic fighting between spacecraft would not be very visually interesting to directly watch in real time,” said Christopher S. Baird, associate professor of physics at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, Texas.
That intense battle from “Return of the Jedi” comes off as a black-sky version of the blue-sky, air-to-air dogfighting scene in “Top Gun: Maverick,” where modern U.S. fighter jets battle Russian-made counterparts to take out the nuclear bomb-making capability of an unnamed nation. That couldn’t happen in space, Baird said in an email interview with Apogee.
“There is effectively zero air in outer space, meaning that spaceships cannot turn in the way that airplanes do, by banking off of the air,” said Baird, author of a series of online articles called “Science Questions with Surprising Answers.” The Millennium Falcon might not even be facing in the right direction. Because of its interaction with the air in Earth’s atmosphere, an airplane tends to be pointed forward. A spaceship, on the other hand, can move in one direction while facing any other direction.
Too fast to turn
There’s also the question of time and distance. Traveling across huge tracts of empty space in a reasonable period means accelerating to very high velocities — certainly possible because there is effectively no air in outer space to oppose the motion. But this would create a lot of inertia. “It takes a long time or a huge force, or both, to significantly bend the path of a spacecraft or to slow it down,” Baird said. So, no bobbing and weaving by TIE fighters, the swarming, single-seat Empire craft that take their name from twin ion engines.
What’s more, with those high velocities, navigating and targeting require absolute precision. “If the direction that a spacecraft or missile is traveling is even a tiny bit off from what it needs to be, it will end up very far away from its intended destination. For this reason, a successful kinetic strike on a distant enemy target in space would require much advance planning and very accurate calculations.”
As for deflector shields, ubiquitous in space warfighting and dating back to a work of fiction from the early 1900s, Baird doesn’t know of anyone describing “the supposed underlying physics,” so he can’t evaluate the concept. Keeping a wormhole open? Using warp drive? The first is not possible and the latter is nonexistent. “Despite the fact that some prominent scientists enjoy theoretically speculating about wormholes, and doing scientific calculations in toy universes, the real universe does not contain any type of matter that could hold a wormhole open,” he said. And: “The fundamental structure of space and time prevents an object from ever traveling faster than the speed of light in vacuum.” Ditto for Star Trek’s matter transporter and Star Wars’ Death Star, whose beams destroy planets.
Photon torpedoes from Star Trek have some basis in physics, combining matter and antimatter to mutually self-annihilate. But the name is wrong; they don’t consist of photons, which are packets of light. And using current technology, creating even minuscule amounts of antimatter would be “ridiculously expensive.”
Baird dismisses the idea that the rules may be different in a galaxy far, far away. “By their nature, fundamental laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe. If they weren’t, then a different galaxy obeying different laws of physics would be immediately obvious to us.” He provided an example: “If gravity acted differently in a distant galaxy, even slightly, then the shape, mass distribution, rotation, and other measurable properties would contradict ‘our’ laws of physics. However, what we find is that ‘our’ laws of gravity [i.e. those discovered by Earthlings] correctly describe galaxies, stars, and black holes everywhere in the universe.” Still, he said, “From an artistic standpoint, it’s perfectly fine to dream up a fictional universe where the laws of physics are different.”
A more informed audience may come to view the space warfighting tropes of the original Star Wars era as quaint, like the iconic rocket poking an anthropomorphic man in the moon in the eye during the first space movie, the silent French short “A Trip to the Moon” in 1902. Space warfighting, in fact, doesn’t get much of the praise for technical accuracy that is heaped upon some of Hollywood’s latest sci-fi creations.
Advice and accuracy
Producers and directors have been turning to space scientists for advice for decades. NASA has an entire entertainment liaison team. Its longtime leader, Bert Ulrich, as well as former astronaut and U.S. Navy aviator Scott Kelly, have signed on with Space 11 Corp., an Italian producer’s new space entertainment production label. Other productions that hired experts from NASA and elsewhere in the space community include “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Apollo 13,” “The Martian,” “Ad Astra,” “Lucy in the Sky,” “Interstellar,” “Foundation” and “For All Mankind.” The streaming series “The Expanse,” replete with rebel and alien warfighting and praised for its scientific accuracy, was helmed by a showrunner who holds a Ph.D. in applied physics and electrical engineering.
Joshua Colwell, a physics professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and dean of the school’s College of Sciences, advised on the asteroid-versus-Earth film “Deep Impact.” Colwell told Apogee that when it comes to scientific accuracy, he draws a distinction between space films where the audience expects it and space films where the audience doesn’t.
“It matters because it can be somewhat deceptive if you’re making a movie about something that looks like it could happen, but you’re actually distorting things and presenting things that really could not happen,” he said. “So, if ‘Deep Impact’ had warp speed in it, that would have been terrible. But Star Trek having warp speed in it, or Star Wars having hyperdrive, I have no qualms about that whatsoever.”
“Deep Impact” illustrates Colwell’s point. Disaster films were the rage during the Y2K panic that preceded the millennium. Two studios released asteroid films within months of each other in 1998 — the character-driven “Deep Impact,” starring Téa Leoni, and the action-adventure “Armageddon,” starring Bruce Willis. “Deep Impact” earned praise for scientific accuracy, portraying the before, during and after of a collision. In “Armageddon,” a team plants a nuclear bomb and blasts apart the asteroid. Both films did well at the box office while earning poor Rotten Tomatoes scores — 45 for “Deep Impact” and 43 for “Armageddon.”
Among science fiction films that are off the mark, “‘Armageddon’ has a special place in my heart,” said Colwell, who studies small bodies like planetary rings, asteroids and comets, and has served as an investigator on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Pointing out the dozens of inaccuracies in “Armageddon” became a sport across the dial-up internet of 1998. For one thing, the asteroid they destroyed likely would have hit Earth anyway, in pieces.
“It’s a movie that’s nominally set in the real world, but that is completely wrong on almost every aspect of itself scientifically; we really could get hit by a comet or an asteroid,” Colwell said. “That offends me as a scientist, even though, with all the mistakes and stupid things that they did in that movie, it’s more grounded in reality than ‘Star Trek’ is.”
In “Star Trek” — and Colwell calls himself a “big Trekkie” — they’re clearly pretending. “That’s like, ‘We need to get people from here to there. We don’t want to mess with all this other stuff, so we invent the matter transporter. And we want to be able to go from planet to planet, so we invent faster-than-light travel.’ And that’s not what ‘Armageddon’ is doing. Armageddon is like, ‘Oh, here’s a real thing, and this has saved the world, and blah, blah, blah. And it gives people a very false picture of how things are. That’s the two lenses I view things through.”
Unknown is fair game
In fact-checking the world of pretend, Colwell notes that you can’t really see laser beams unless there’s some element for them to illuminate, and that’s unlikely in the vacuum of space. But he gives many filmmakers the benefit of the doubt — even with wormholes, like the one guarded by the “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” intergalactic outpost. The idea of a wormhole, a space-time connection also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, is mathematically permitted through Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It’s just that it isn’t a hole or something you could actually pass through.
“But there are all sorts of aspects of it that we have not tested, and there are some elements of general relativity that are problematic in terms of how it coexists with quantum mechanics,” Colwell said. “So, I think that’s a realm where there’s enough uncertainty about how the universe really works in those extreme environments that I’m like, ‘That’s ripe territory for dramatists to exploit and make something up.’”
Another quality Colwell looks for as filmmakers stretch and exceed the laws of physics is consistency. It’s a common subject of discussion among movie fans online, including those who welcomed how a lingering warfighting question was finally answered in episode eight of the Star Wars canon, “The Last Jedi.”
The question: Why do capital ships — the class of shielded, colossal vessels that travel in armadas and can carry a crew of thousands — get so close to each other to exchange fire? After the film’s 2017 release, an answer appeared in a video analysis viewed nearly half a million times at a YouTube site that touts its “Unique perspectives on exciting aspects of Star Wars and Star Trek.” In this galaxy, it seems, turbo lasers aboard capital ships have a fairly low effective range against shielded targets, according to the video.
“The scientific realism question comes up a lot, and my general feeling about it is that as long as a work is internally self-consistent and true to what they’re setting up as the rules, then that’s fine,” Colwell said. “Lots of times they’re not pretending to be in our universe. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a great example. It’s not our universe, and the rules are different, and that’s fine.”
The nature of real-life warfighting in space is now taking shape. Military forces in Ukraine and civil air operators across Europe work to sidestep Russian interference with on-orbit targeting and navigation systems. The United States and the Chinese Communist Party engage in what a U.S. Space Force general describes as “dogfighting in space” by maneuvering satellites in new ways for closer surveillance.
Might this authentic but less visual space warfighting ever inspire Hollywood films? Maybe so, Colwell said, even if it turns out to be more John le Carré than George Lucas.
“You don’t have to have explosions or things like that to have a good movie,” he said. “It’s the Cold War-type movies, right? Ultimately, for me as a movie buff, what makes a movie good, first and foremost, is you’ve got to have characters that you care about and whatever else is going on is secondary to that.
“I think it would be challenging because this would be in that category of movie that’s set in our real world. You’d have to have people making the movie who understand the kinds of things the generals are talking about. You know, something happens and we lose the ability to find out, and you attach it to some human story — they’re going to be able to do something horrible to our people. That’s what you care about.”