![]() Speaking of those future spacecraft, they were unique in another, more prosaic way. So the huge rocket had to lift much more mass than did the Ranger shuttles going to and from the exoplanets. He also mentioned that the Saturn V was launching not only the mass of the Rangers, but also the mass of the supplies needed at the crew's mothership, Endurance. So the engine pods would have some kind of compact tokamak fusion generator for power, that sort of thing." "But of course, these produce much, much higher levels of thrust than the ion engines of today. "The engines are imagined to be something plasma electric, a super-advanced version of the ion engines already being used in space exploration," Franklin said. And you'd need a big heavy-lift vehicle to get those two chunky Rangers up into space."īut if it took a reconditioned Saturn V to get away from Earth, how about those single-stage-to-orbit shuttles the film's pioneering astronauts (led by Cooper, a former farmer played by Matthew McConaughey) used to reach the exoplanets? So I didn't think that was too far-fetched. After all, the new SLS incorporates elements of Apollo technology. They refurbished it and launched it … I think that's entirely plausible. So I had this backstory that the Saturn V that you see being launched has actually been taken from the museum in Florida. "The implication is that the whole mission has been put together from what is available. So they are using whatever they have got to accomplish this," he said. "The idea I had was that this is the last gasp of the space program, the last best hope for us to go and find someplace else to live. Franklin said that the retired Apollo moon rocket was chosen for its familiarity to the viewer - and for another reason: "We wanted an iconic image of that big rocket taking off, that cascade of frozen condensation falling away … by recreating those classic, well-known angles."īut there was more at work in the choice of a Saturn V as well, Franklin said. Yes, that was a trusty Saturn V rocket you saw leaving the launch silo in the film. This explains two interesting choices in "Interstellar" - first, the launch vehicle for leaving Earth. ![]() We could have done it digitally, which is very sophisticated these days, but people can still detect the difference between something that is physical and real and photographed, and something that has been digitally generated." With the script set in a not-too-distant future, Franklin and his team would need to blend familiar technology (rockets) with futuristic ideas (high-tech shuttles).Īs Franklin explained, "We wanted to ground the cinematography in the language of the Apollo and Gemini missions, a very reality-based look of space exploration. "It's a first."īut to explore these deep-space vistas would require getting the characters into space first. "We found that the academic world never had pushed this high before, because they didn't need to," Franklin recalled. It was a remarkable advance in visual effects, he added, and it created images that not only wowed audiences globally, but were also the first true high-resolution moving views of such astronomical wonders. "Kip got us the three-dimensional mathematics behind these things, and we were able to turn this into software that could accurately calculate all the light-ray paths around these objects, to show how they distort space and create these vast gravitational lenses," Franklin said. But science came to the rescue once again. How to create such things accurately without taking too much artistic license was a concern for Franklin. They are three-dimensional spheres, because they are holes in three-dimensional space," "The whole concept of a black hole in space as a giant drain that everything is swirling around and going down into - a two-dimensional hole in space - that's not how it is. Previous depictions "are fundamentally wrong," Franklin recalls Thorne explaining. Thorne told Franklin that it would be nice if they could represent these cosmological wonders accurately, which Thorne said would be a first in a science fiction film. He discussed what wormholes and black holes are, how gravity can warp space and affect time - things I had a bit of understanding about, but he really laid it out on the line for me," he added. "Kip is a fantastic communicator, and he sat with me and went through space-time 101.
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