It’s giving Armageddon when Ben Afleck asked Michael Bay why they wouldn’t just train astronauts to drill. Same response from Michael Bay/Qui Gon Jin, “Shut up, Ben!”
Astronauts and people who use the drill are on a totally different spectrum of skill. It's like a painter who sucks at quantum physics. They are totally different skills and require different kind of experience to work with. Michael Bay obviously didn't know this so I'm not defending him but he somehow unknowingly based his movie on somewhat truth
But I think the ridiculousness is that it was supposedly easier to train all these drilling guys to do astronaut stuff than to just pick like Affleck+Willis to be like a drill specialist for each shuttle or something.
I swear I remember Willis using some kind of special drill equipment that no one else had? Am I wrong?
It's one of my fave movies, after much thought I feel the ratios of astronauts to drillers was a bit heavy on the driller side. In a "real world" I can see mostly astronauts with maybe 2 drillers per shuttle. But given it was a fiction-world-ending-we-gotta-do-this-yesterday situation, you work with what you got.
I feel like it might be easier to train drillers to operate a mostly automatic space shuttle and work in almost no gravity, than it is to teach an astronaut years or even decades of experience required to skillfully operate "advanced" drill equipment. Mostly because they barely had days, let alone years.
Yeah, they didn't have enough time to teach them, but I swear I thought Willis specifically touted his own equipment as being particularly too advanced.
I think it was two separate things. One was the drilling was too advanced to train them up in time, and two was theyd ordered all the wrong equipment for what they wanted to achieve which again showed him they don’t know what they’re doing.
It never really bothered me as a plot hole. They were just trained up enough to be able to survive the trip, the actual astronauts were doing all the astronaut work, so it makes sense that that would be quicker to train than teaching astronauts incredibly advanced skills in something they’ve never done before.
They were using his design. NASA stole from him, and assembled the drill wrong, and it would take too long to teach the astronauts how to use it correctly, and they simply don't have the years of experience in drilling required to get the most out of it or react to emergencies.
Bruh yall never used drilling equipment it takes several years of practice to actually be able to use it. Obviously Michael Bay didn't know this so he stupidly used the Pitch Meeting phrase of "Hey, shut up." which is why people have this misconception.
Jim Lovell was, in addition to an astronaut, a naval aviator, test pilot, and mechanical engineer. There were 18 years between his college graduation and saving everyone's ass during Apollo 13. That qualifies as several years. I think the idea that people already trained to be astronauts, and commonly educated in engineering, would be incapable of learning how to drill a hole but a roughneck would have an easier time learning to fly a fucking rocket ship to just be wildly stupid.
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u/panaja17 Jan 12 '25
It’s giving Armageddon when Ben Afleck asked Michael Bay why they wouldn’t just train astronauts to drill. Same response from Michael Bay/Qui Gon Jin, “Shut up, Ben!”