Abstract
“Mr. Sulu, assume standard orbit.” How often have we heard Captain Kirk utter those words? The sheer number of scenes to entire screenplays set on either a space station or a spaceship means that a surprising amount of sci-fi drama occurs while the heroes are simply going around and around and around. Recent examples include The 100 (2014–), Elysium (2013), and Gravity (2013).
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Aliens
Zero G and I feel fine.
John Glenn, first American astronaut in orbit, 20 February 1962
Once you get to Earth orbit, you’re half-way to anywhere in the Solar System.
Robert A. Heinlein, science fiction novelist
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Notes
- 1.
Although the electrons don’t orbit in the manner of single particle moving along a path, but rather they act like standing waves completely wrapped around the nucleus. See Chap. 4: “Matter Matters” in Vol. 1 for more details.
- 2.
Remember, by “massive”, we mean “an object with mass” rather than the more colloquial meaning “huge”. Some relatively small objects—like a neutron star—can have a very big gravitational influence.
- 3.
If you project the spacecraft’s position straight down to the surface of Earth (or whatever planet it’s orbiting), the path that projection traces out is called the ground track.
- 4.
See Hollyweird Science Vol. 1, Chap. 7: “A Quantum of Weirdness”.
- 5.
The first cinematic use of matter transporter was the 1958 film The Fly. They were also used in Gerry Anderson’s 1962 program Fireball XL-5, and in the BBC series Blake’s 7.
- 6.
Russia, the United States, Japan, China, Ukraine, India, Iran, Israel, and North Korea. Collectively, the multinational European Space Agency also launches Earth-orbiting satellites. Other countries operate spacecraft in orbit, but they were launched, and in some cases built, by one of the countries/agencies already listed.
- 7.
The United States, Russia, China, ESA, Japan, and India.
- 8.
Not science fiction, but included here as one of the best space movies ever.
- 9.
This kind of diagram goes all the way back to Isaac Newton, although he used cannons and cannonballs, because Olden Times.
- 10.
With apologies to Douglas Adams.
- 11.
Or, as UCLA Professor William Kaula, one of KRG’s dissertation committee members, was fond of saying, “An orbit always returns to the scene of the crime.”
- 12.
Despite being a bit of a jerk in 2001, HAL 9000 actually had a touching death scene.
- 13.
They also get a bit of help from a big-ass shock wave when the planet undergoes a hydrogen flash. This is similar to the helium flash that stars go towards the end of their lives… except this was the beginning of a stellar life.
- 14.
Some claim that the term should actually be escape speed. Physicists delineate between speed and velocity: speed is a rate of travel and velocity is the rate of travel in a given direction. With that in mind, the notion of escape velocity does have an implied direction: on a radial line outward from the central body (aka “up”).
- 15.
In its third season, KRG was invited to the Hart Building on the Paramount Studio lot to pitch story ideas for Star Trek: Voyager. During his first meeting, after exchanging introductory pleasantries with the writer to whom he was assigned to pitch, the first three sentences were, “What’s the name of this story?” “Separatrix”. “Eff that!” Only he didn’t say, “Eff”. Welcome to Hollywood.
- 16.
A concept related to that of the separatrix is a dynamical bifurcation. A separatrix represents a dynamical “fork in the road,” leading to very different evolutions of the system. If a spacecraft was travelling exactly at the escape velocity, some small nudge would eventually make it either fall below escape velocity into a captured, or returning, orbit, or zoom off “To infinity and beyond!” Similarly, if an egg were to balance on the peak of a roof, a tiny gust of wind or earth tremor would eventually cause it to roll one way or another: landing in the back yard to become a snack for the dog, or on the front sidewalk to become a slip hazard for the mailman. This latter kind of bifurcation, one that has the power to generate dramatically different timelines, is called a Jonbar point or Jonbar hinge in science fiction—particularly alternate history science fiction—and was explored in depth in the 2008 Doctor Who episode “Turn Left”.
- 17.
Knowing how to come up with this equation can be very helpful. In 2001 at the Dragon*Con convention in Atlanta, KRG met a charming and attractive member of the opposite sex, one who had a difficult time believing his claims that he was a “rocket scientist.” A mitigating factor in this was likely the two adult beverages that were sloshing around his otherwise empty stomach. With a physics degree herself, the young lady insisted KRG prove his mettle by writing the equation for escape velocity. Instead, he performed the above derivation on the back of a business card. The two wound up dating for over 2 years. Irrespective of this particular heartwarming outcome, Hollyweird Science does not condone drinking and deriving.
- 18.
There is something of an inconsistency in Interstellar with regard to this point. It takes a rocket on par with a Saturn V to get the crew off Earth, yet the far smaller shuttle that takes them to Miller’s Planet—with 1.3 times the surface gravity—is able to achieve orbit.
- 19.
If you’re one of those tiresome types who like to say “Actually, there’s no such thing as a centrifugal force, just a centripetal force…”, actually, there is such a thing. You don’t want to get into this argument with us, unless you’re really good at the math involved with rotating reference frames. The common argument is that “There is no such thing as centrifugal force, it’s simply inertia.” This is exactly equivalent to saying, “You know that force that slams you into the car seat when you push your car’s accelerator to the floor? That’s not a real force, it’s just inertia.” Clench tight, we’ll be going to that well again in Chap. 10.
- 20.
Back on the topic of centrifugal force acting on an orbiting spacecraft, another way of casting the situation is that gravity is acting towards Earth—it is a centripetal or center-seeking force. If you believe in Newton’s third law, that for every force there is an equal and opposite force… centrifugal force is that equal and opposite force.
- 21.
This assumes you are going into a typical west-to-east orbit. If for some reason you wanted to go east-to-west you’d go as far north as possible to minimize the tangential velocity you’d need to neutralize during the ascent.
- 22.
Not to mention the conservation of angular momentum.
- 23.
Lower altitudes with the low Earth orbit bands still have just enough atmosphere to cause drag that slows objects in orbit. Left unchecked, this will cause the object’s orbit to decay, as happened with America’s Skylab space station in 1979. This is why the International Space Station has to be boosted periodically by visiting spacecraft to maintain its orbit.
- 24.
Things moving in higher orbits move more slowly and still stay aloft because they have higher total energy than objects in lower orbits. This may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense if you consider how slowly the moon, 370,000 km away, moves—just 1 km/s—compared to the ISS in LEO.
- 25.
In more recent years, in honor of his research on the planets of this Solar System, Kepler’s name was given to an astronomical satellite that has discovered thousands of planets orbiting distant stars.
- 26.
Also called centers.
- 27.
We know it’s confusing, but don’t mix up this variable e with the mathematical constant e we use to discuss exponential growth in Chap. 2.
- 28.
Especially the orbits of Venus and Neptune.
- 29.
Often you will hear the term periapsis and apoapsis for these points of an orbit, even by professionals. In the same manner that “irregardless” is not a word, neither are “periapsis” nor “apoapsis” legitimate words, even though often-used. The term pericenter means “closest to the center”, while apocenter means “farthest from the center” (recall that an orbit has two points that are called “centers”). The term “apse” (literally: arch) is an overarching term (see what we did there?) that describes both the nearest and farthest points of the orbit—what a mathematician would call the extrema. The term periapsis means “closest to the apse” and apoapsis means “farthest from the apse”, when in fact both the pericentric and apocentric points lie on the apsidal line, aka the major axis.
- 30.
The orbits of Venus and Neptune are as close to perfect circles as you will find in Nature.
- 31.
While undetected dwarf planets almost certainly exist, to put this notion in perspective, perturbations on Neptune would allow observers to detect a Mars-sized object out to 300 AU, and a Jupiter-sized object out to 1000 AU.
- 32.
Some of whom are scientists, others… not so much.
- 33.
Nemesis is mentioned in the Eureka episode “What Goes Around Comes Around”, the key difference being that Eureka openly admits to being a work of science fiction.
- 34.
Also commonly spelled Nuburu.
- 35.
Conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists are notorious for jumping on any small coincidence, any unfortunate turn of a phrase, any ever-so-slightly ambiguous sentence in a NASA press release, as concrete “proof” of their ideas. In the same spirit, we can’t help but note that “leider”, in German, means “unfortunately.” Clearly, an advance tip-off that Leider—if that is her real name—is of dubious veracity.
- 36.
The “Grays” from Zeta Reticuli 4—with the big heads and cold black eyes—that appear in so many science fiction stories (like X-Files) have their origin in experiences of Betty and Barney Hill. Under hypnotic regression (and we’ll discuss the issues with that in a future chapter), the Hills recounted how they were allegedly abducted by aliens during a drive through the White Mountains of New Hampshire—a story that was chronicled in the book The Interrupted Journey (1966) and the film The UFO Incident (1975) (among others). A newer film exploring the story of the Hills, with the working title Captured, was announced in September 2015.
- 37.
Sounds legit.
- 38.
We really should discuss angular momentum conservation at some point.
- 39.
The naming convention for new objects like comets and asteroids may look like a random mix of letters and number, but it is neither cryptic, nor difficult to decode. The first number is the year of its discovery. There are 52 weeks in a year, and 25 letters in the alphabet (the letter “I” is not used), so the first letter denotes the two-week period within the year of its discovery. The second letter is then assigned according to the object’s order of discovery in that two week period. Since modern sky surveys can detect hundreds of objects in a two-week period, the number indicates how many times the alphabet has cycled through. In the year 2001, the object discovered on January 1 would be named 2001 AA, then 2001 AB, 2001 AC, to 2001 AZ. The next object would be 2001 AA1. By its designation, we can tell that 2001 KX76 was discovered in the 10th two-week period in 2001 (May 22nd), and a lot of other objects were discovered in that time frame.
- 40.
Assuming NASA is telling the truth that is. Conspiracy theorists love to cast aspersions on NASA’s truthiness (borrowing a term from Malcolm Reynolds), but there are a whole host of non-NASA institutions and organizations that report this type of information. At least they want you to think they’re not part of NASA.
- 41.
A catch-all term for any of a number of different classes of cold icy objects that orbit beyond Neptune.
- 42.
How is this for highly amusing? Here’s an example of when one doomsday/conspiracy theorist cites previous failed doomsday/conspiracy theories to lend credence to their own soon-to-be-failed doomsday/conspiracy theory: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-niburu-planet-x-system-and-its-potential-impacts-on-our-solar-system/5459788
- 43.
Because, clearly, some believe Kepler’s Laws are not laws, merely guidelines. Even more recent discussions of Niburu online, including ZetaTalk, claim that the planet is hiding on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth.
- 44.
Although both authors view themselves as creative chaps, we’re not making any of this conspiracy stuff up. Why waste creative effort when others have already done the heavy lifting?
- 45.
Admittedly, it was a slow explosion, more of a gravitational disruption… but go with us, we’re on a roll.
- 46.
The approach of ISON was used as the hook for the 2013-2014 Korean soft science fiction mega-hit limited TV series 별에서 온 그대, a.k.a. My Love From Another Star (an American remake was in development but has since been postponed). The series was timed so that’s its climatic episodes would air as ISON made its closest approach, in hopes of leveraging the inevitable news coverage of the astronomical event into free advertising. ISON’s subsequent fizzle far from Earth forced the script writers to create a second, fictional, comet to take its place. As they say in showbiz, never work with children, animals, or giant rubble balls of rock and ice.
- 47.
One of the drawbacks of making predictions like this in a book, as opposed to on a blog or social media, is that books take much longer to progress from the author’s keyboard, through several layers of editorial oversight, to the typesetter, then to the public. This sentence was typed well before the release of the Batygin and Brown paper heralding the possible existence of a distant ninth planet—and already there are web sites proclaiming this yet-to-be-discovered object Niburu.
- 48.
Molynia orbits were also used for Russian spy satellites. Perigee would be over the US, so camera resolution would be high, then the lengthy downlinks of stored imagery could be relayed as the satellite moved slowly over Russian ground stations on the other side of the planet.
- 49.
Historical astronomers are all but certain that Galileo saw Neptune on at least one occasion, perhaps more. Because of its distance from the Sun, it moved so slowly that he did not realize he was seeing a planet.
- 50.
An AU or “astronomical unit” is equal to the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.
- 51.
The rock band No Doubt had an album entitled Return of Saturn—named because Saturn takes roughly 30 years to orbit the Sun, and lead singer Gwen Stefani had recently turned 30.
- 52.
The word “month” derives from the same word as “moon”.
- 53.
Science writer and science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke is often credited with pioneering the idea of geostationary orbits, but although he popularized the notion, the concept actually dates back to 1928, to a story by German author Hermann Noordung entitled The Problem with Space Travel. What Clarke did do was make the connection between this type of orbit and its usefulness for broadcast satellites and relay satellites, like the constellation of NASA TDRS satellites we discuss in later chapters. This is why a geostationary orbit is sometimes referred to as a Clarke orbit.
- 54.
Not really an orbit thing, but a cool fact for which we couldn’t find a better place: the woman who played Betty Fernandez (David Bowman’s “widow”), was Mary Jo Deschanel—mother of Emily (Dr. Temperance Brennan from Bones) and Zooey (Trillian in 2005’s Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
- 55.
Although, due to Kepler’s third law, this point should orbit M big faster than does M small , the gravitational influence of M small pulls the small object along for the ride so that it orbits at the same period.
- 56.
The simplest of the many-body, or N-body, problems to which we alluded in Chap. 3.
- 57.
Based upon the bestselling 2008 book of the same name by Liu Cixin.
- 58.
Somebody brought in to give an, often uncredited, polish to a script or to resolve a particular story or pacing problem.
- 59.
Perlman devotion to science is reflected even in the name of her production company: Uncanny Valley Productions.
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Grazier, K.R., Cass, S. (2017). The Gravity of the Situation: Orbits. In: Hollyweird Science: The Next Generation. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54215-7_8
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