"Armageddon’s" Science Blasted By Astrophysicist – 9.5 Gs Would Kill

Dan Lalonde
Mar 30
2 min read

"ARMAGEDDON" MOON SCENE & ASTROPHYSICIST VDEOS BELOW ARTICLE:

Armageddon may literally be the movie I've seen most in my life. To some people art is paintings in the Louvre to me it's the Montage Launch scene during the President's speech. Michael Bay’s 1998 sci-fi blockbuster might have pulled in over half a billion dollars at the box office, but a real-life astrophysicist just gave it a brutal reality check. In a recent breakdown for Insider, astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter rated one of the film’s space scenes when they slingshot around around the moon to land on the asteroid.

“When they’re approaching the Moon to do that lunar roll, as they called it, they turned their spacecraft towards [it] as if they were fighter jets banking into a turn. But this is space — there’s no air, there’s nothing to bank against. You can just go with it. You’re fine. You’re going to go around the Moon — it’s all good. So 9.5 Gs means that the pressure you’ll feel, the weight you’ll get pushed up against your chair, is nine and a half times stronger than our normal experience of gravity. This is generally going to be miserable. 9.5 strikes me as a very unrealistic number, especially for that length of time."

"They’re just going to pass out and be starved of oxygen for 10 minutes, which is death. The astronauts are getting a gravity assist from the Moon so that they can get a speed boost to land on an asteroid. The idea is you need to catch up to it — you need to match speeds with it — otherwise you’re just going to crash into it. So, launching from the surface of the Earth, we can do this. We’ve done rendezvous missions with moving asteroids and comets. There’s no reason for them to experience G-forces during a slingshot maneuver. The whole time you’re doing a slingshot maneuver, you’re in space. There’s hardly any gravity."

"You don’t feel any gravity when you’re in space. And when you’re doing this slingshot maneuver around the Moon, or any object — the Moon is big, yes, you’re accelerating — but that boost is taking place over the course of hours as you orbit around the Moon. So it’s a very slow and gentle process, so you don’t feel anything extra. And I saw them in that clip, they’re like burning their rockets, and I was like, ‘Man, that takes a lot of fuel.’ I was like, ‘If you have enough fuel to be already in space and then do this accelerated boost maneuver, just skip the Moon and you can just go right to the asteroid.’ That’s why they don’t put me in charge of writing movies. I would rate this clip a three [out of 10].”