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Watched this last night. It's 100/80 on Rotten Tomatoes. It is indeed a rather well made film (especially for an indy Russian production), chronicling the rescue of Salyut 7, a dead Russian space station, whose orbit was decaying.

The movie is gripping, with edge of your seat drama. The CGI space visuals are beautifully done for the most part. The acting is generally very good (it's in Russian with English subtitles). It's very entertaining. Think of it as the Russian version of "The Martian" where the rescue crew needs to figure out a series of repairs to the crippled ship.

There's only ONE.. SMALL.. PROBLEM.

Even though it's billed as a documentary, it's almost entirely a complete fabrication of the events that actually occurred.

That doesn't make it a bad movie. As a work of fiction, it's great. I'd put it up there with the movie Gravity.

But if you want to know what ACTUALLY happened to the Salyut 7, read this article on ArsTechnica:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09 ... e-station/

FlyingPenguin wrote: But if you want to know what ACTUALLY happened to the Salyut 7, read this article on ArsTechnica:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09 ... e-station/

Good read.

What's really impressive is the way the Russians are willing to just 'play it by ear', get up there, and make it up as they go along.

By contrast, NASA doesn't send anyone into space without first rehearsing the hell out of it, practicing every single possible procedure, in all possible permutations, exhaustively until the astronauts can do it in their sleep.

That's one reason that teaming up with the Russians on the ISS has benefited us. The Russians learned a long time ago that if you're going to live in space - or just do a very long duration mission - you can't predict everything and practice everything in advance. You need to wing it.

We've trained a whole generation of astronauts this way, who will in turn train the next generation that will setup a lunar base and maybe go on to Mars, where 'winging it' will be a big part of it.

Gonna check this out. Thanks for the heads up on all of the extra drama.