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"       If you&amp;#039;ve watched the heart-pounding trailer for Alfonso Cuaron&amp;#039;s Gravity, out today, then there&amp;#039;s no spoiling the film&amp;#039;s essential plot line: Astronauts Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) fight to stabilize and survive in orbit after a barrage of space junk rips apart their spacecraft and all weightless hell breaks loose. The story is sparse, elegant, and simple\u2014it&amp;#039;s a disaster movie in the void. And it is no pure thought exercise. This will happen, if not so cinematically. It&amp;#039;s already dangerous up there, and I don&amp;#039;t just mean because space is inhospitable and the universe is trying to kill you. We&amp;#039;re not giving away much of movie to tell you the cloud of debris that annihilates Stone and Kowalski&amp;#039;s space shuttle is the result of Russia destroying its own spy satellite. Tom Jones, former astronaut and PopMech contributor who attended our screening of the film last night as a spacewalking expert, reminded the audience that this plot point is plucked from real life: In 2007, China obliterated its own satellite into thousands of chunks of junk just to prove to the world that it could. That doubled the risk to astronauts aboard the International Space Station, Jones said. Today, spacefaring nations realize the threat of space junk and are a little more considerate. Modern satellites are designed to either fall into the Earth&amp;#039;s orbit and burn up at the end of their useful lives, or push themselves out to a distant, safe parking orbit. And China, which is launching its own manned space effort and hopes to send astronauts to the moon, is probably going to be a bit more contentious about orbital safety now that it is sending up its own people. That doesn&amp;#039;t help us in the short term, though. A great many of the small pieces of debris will burn up in the atmosphere in the next couple of decades, improving the situation in orbit. But before then, the rise of the private space industry will carry more humans into orbit than ever before, first with the wealthy buying tickets on short suborbital hops for a quick taste of weightlessness and eventually with more of us launching to some kind of tourist destination high above the Earth. The suborbital hops produce no new space junk, but the increased use in space adds to the risk of what Jones called &amp;quot;a conjunction&amp;quot; in space. NASA does a great job of tracking debris larger than about the size of a fist, Jones said. But they can&amp;#039;t track everything. And more traffic in orbit, he argues, means that some kind of orbital disaster is inevitable. Space travel messes with our notion of risk assessment, which is already suspect: Most obviously, even though people are far more likely to die in a car accident, we&amp;#039;re far more likely to be afraid of flying, since flying feels more unnatural and fails more spectacularly. Space takes both of those to the extreme. Drifting weightless around the planet in an incredibly hostile environment makes flying like a bird appear ordinary. And losing people in space, as we saw with the two space shuttle accidents, marks a national tragedy. You might depart the theater after Gravity with mixed emotions about going to space yourself. Cuaron&amp;#039;s tracking shots and sweeping vistas of the blue marble below evoke a sort of spiritual response, especially in the spaces between suspense when the movie gets quiet. Of course, the Bullock and Clooney characters spend much of the film spinning and flailing in mortal danger, dodging hunks of metal that become ballistic missiles at orbital speed. Jones sees Gravity as appearing amid a rising wave of interest in space brought on by the emerging private space industry, and that&amp;#039;s a hopeful trend. But humanity has to be realistic about risk assessment, and ready for the high drama of trying to rescue space travelers after a disaster in orbit. Perhaps when space travel becomes common, and not simply the domain of professional astronauts, we&amp;#039;ll treat space disasters like plane crashes\u2014tragedies that can be made extremely uncommon, but never eliminated. And that will be a good thing. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a9590/gravity-there-will-be-a-deadly-accident-in-space-16001990/>