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There have been a number of recent "mission to Mars" movie all with the same basic plot - a critical system breaks on the long voyage, and they're all gonna die. There's never a backup system for the critical one, no repair parts, either.

It's always either the air recycling system or the water one.

"Stowaway" is the latest in this genre. There, a suitcase size device breaks in this massive spaceship. No backup. Can't fix it. All gonna die.

It's crazy to design a long term deep space ship like that.




SNL parodied this in the most recent episode https://youtu.be/FuaDWyCnJxs


Haha, that was actually funny!

Looks like they got tmux installed, too! But it would have been funnier if the computer display had showed Apple II assembler code like the Terminator did.


One thing I'd do with a deep space mission design is to design as many interchangeable parts as possible, even among unrelated systems.

For example, use bolts that are all the same thread size. Use the same embedded system boards and chips. Use the same electric motors. The same fan blades.

Remember the Apollo 13 mission where they had two CO2 filtering systems, but the cartridges for them were unnecessarily incompatible.


Then the plot of the film would be that that one bolt or chip design used everywhere has a flaw that slowly starts to manifest in all of them …




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