Sure scientists enjoy the first Iron Man movie. They’re human beings after all, and that was a pretty decent movie. But I would never have expected scientists to love it for…well, for its approach to science.
At the NewSpace panel I attended yesterday, Mark Street, from XCOR, said he and a group of colleagues went to see the first film together.
“Our favorite part was the testing,” he said at the panel. “You know the part where he tries out the rocket boots, and he turns them on at like 10% and gets thrown onto the roof of car? We cracked up because that’s exactly what happens.”
Obviously, Street was joking, but his point was that Iron Man was one of the few movies to offer a smatter of realism in how science gets done: Have an idea, test it, have it not work right, try again.
One of the marvels of Comic-Con is that when a panelist asks the people in the room whether they’d be willing to risk a fatal mechanical failure for the chance to go into space, everyone raised their hands. It’s the kind of place where nerds roam free, geeks can be both predator and prey, and the answer to the question, “How about going to space?” is foreordained.
