5 Things Interstellar's Science Gets Right (And 5 It Doesn't)

The Bad

5. NASA Couldn't Work Like That

NASA is bleeding huge. At the height of the Apollo space programme they were being given something like $43,554 million dollars a year in today's money, or 4.41% of the annual federal budget, with 411,000 people being employed. Something like 369,900 of those were contractors drafted into help with all this stuff. In Interstellar, NASA is shown to be a covert operation that's still managing to build both spaceships that can withstand travelling to the other side of the galaxy, and a space station that's designed to save the rest of humanity. That's despite them existing outside of the public eye, because it's thought the general populace would get a little peeved at the amount of government money being spent on a pie-in-the-sky space programme when they should be concentrating on dealing with the dust storms and famine that are blighting them on Earth (similar arguments are going on now, in fact). The NASA in Interstellar is supposed to be a bare bones operation and, honestly, that simply wouldn't work. No way could a reduced operation like that manage to pull off even a fraction of what they do in the film.