Ten Years Later, Science in “Armageddon” Still Holds Up
Viewing a movie ten years after its release will make a person realize that certain things can become dated. Fashions change, styles change, even the cars on the street change. However, ten years after the release of Michael Bay’s blockbuster film “Armageddon”, the science in the film remains spot-on in its discussion of both asteroids themselves and how Earth may respond to an actual asteroid on a collision course for Earth.
In the movie, an asteroid the size of Texas is discovered to be only eighteen days away from hitting Earth. With nowhere else to turn, NASA enlists the help of a rag-tag team of oil drillers. Their mission is to launch into space, drill along a fissure on the asteroid, drop a nuclear bomb down the drilled hole, and blow the asteroid into smaller pieces that will miss Earth. When the film was released it was universally praised for staying true to the scientific elements of space while also integrating one of the best love stories of 1998 into the plot. According to the experts, that praise is still well deserved.
David Billsby, a technical systems analyst at NASA, praised the film saying, “First and foremost, everyone knows that huge asteroids are preceded by smaller ‘warning’ asteroids, and these ‘warning’ asteroids are only capable of hitting major cities and only capable of hitting during daytime hours. They won’t land in a field or a lake, and they sure as hell won’t come in at night. To successfully impact Earth, they need the highest possible population density and a day without a cloud in the sky. Armageddon was right on the money in this regard.”
It doesn’t end there, either. “The movie also nailed the fact that there’s only fifteen telescopes on the planet that could spot an asteroid the size of Texas when it’s only eighteen days away from hitting planet Earth. An object that large, and that close to Earth, would be one of the brightest visible objects in the night sky, and most telescopes aren’t capable of handling light that bright.”
Another source at NASA who asked to remain anonymous said that much of NASA’s handbook for dealing with an asteroid capable of causing global extinction came from the movie. “We initially thought that training astronauts to drill may be easier than training oil drillers to be astronauts, but we were proven wrong when we saw the courage displayed by Harry Stamper’s [Bruce Willis] team. As soon as upper management here at NASA saw the film, we began a search for our own rag-tag group of oil drillers that could be capable of producing big time results if the fate of the planet was in their hands. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind here that we made the correct decision.”
