Space Cowboys: Difference between revisions

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* [[The Casanova]]: Jerry is an unrepentant--and for his age, pretty successful--womanizer.
* [[Chekhov's Skill]]: Double the pleasure, double the fun.
** First, the whole point of the story. See [[Black Box]] above. Frank apparently got involved in the Apollo Applications Program, and designed the guidance system for Skylab. That's what was used on the satellite that they need to repair so urgently. And he's the only one left alive that knows anything about it.
** Second, their own skill as pilots, which proves early on not to have decayed much over time. It ultimately helps them through the [[Reentry Scare]].
* [[Companion Cube]]: The hula-dancing Hawaiian girl dashboard ornament.
* [[Contemplative Boss]]: When Gerson summons Corvin (Eastwood) and Hawkins (Jones) to his office after they have crashed yet another prototype, he stands with their back to them, looking out the window, and pointedly asks why he's seeing smoke in the distance.
* [[Conveniently-Close Planet]]: {{spoiler|The satellite's boosters fire on a trajectory that conveniently gets to the moon - and quickly enough that Hawk's air doesn't run out.}}.
* [[Convenient Terminal Illness]]: Hawkins has pancreatic cancer, so {{spoiler|he doesn't mind saving the world by taking a one-way trip to the moon.}}.
* [[Cool Old Guy]]: A band of them.
* [[Dirty Old Man]]: Jerry, again.
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* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: The [[Bittersweet Ending|bittersweet]] yet [[Crowning Moment of Heartwarming|heartwarming]] ending: after {{spoiler|Hawk}} manually ignites the rockets on the Russian satellite and "pilots" it to the moon, finally getting to make the journey. The closing moments show him lying in the wreckage gazing down on the Earth as Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon" plays.
** Not so bittersweet when you remember that {{spoiler|Hawk has a [[Convenient Terminal Illness]]}}.
** {{spoiler|How did he survive the impact with the lunar surface at all? The rockets he ignited would have only put him on a lunar intercept trajectory; he'd need more rockets to slow the fall.}}.
** He didn't -- there's little doubt about that even in the movie. {{spoiler|Hawk's suit is not intact and his supplementary oxygen tank was breached. Nor did he have a moon suit. His goal wasn't to land on the moon -- it was to be buried there.}}.
** He was probably dead long before anyway. It takes three days for conventional rockets to get to the Moon. The [[wikipedia:Extravehicular Mobility Unit|Extravehicular Mobility Unit]] only has 8 1/2 hours of oxygen.
*** He does ask for every spare oxygen bottle they have before leaving. And they did have one remaining Payload Assist Module, which an extraordinarily skilled pilot might have been able to use to cushion a crash landing on the moon.
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* [[Older and Wiser]]: Averted. Older the protagonists may be, but they still behave, by their own admission, like "kids who never grew up".
* [[Putting the Band Back Together]]: Corvin insists on reuniting Team Daedalus and going into space as the price for his co-operation, so NASA sends out two people to round them up.
* [[Reentry Scare]]:
** Comes together with a [[Chekhov's Skill]] during the earlier flight simulator scene: in a some variety of [[Technician Versus Performer]], or [[Good Old Ways]], or any of the related tropes, {{spoiler|the Team Daedalus manage to "land" the "Space Shuttle", but only after the computer is disabled and they have to do it manually}}. The younger generation astronauts find this nigh-unbelievable.
* [[Retired Badass]]: The whole of Team Daedalus.
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* [[You Fail Physics Forever]]: The satellite's orbit is decaying ''because it's heavy''. In real life, a satellite's orbit decays due to drag from the outer atmosphere; a heavy satellite's orbit would decay ''more slowly'' than a light satellite's orbit.
** Not necessarily. It actually depends on, ironically, its aerodynamics. And that didn't exactly look like the Concorde. Still the wrong rationale used in-film, though.
*** {{spoiler|Of course, the "Too Heavy" part may have been a cover, given the satellite's '''real''' purpose.}} .
** Also: a tour guide states that in order to reach the Moon, you only have to get something (in this case, a hypothetical baseball) halfway there, since the Moon's gravity would take it the rest of the way. {{spoiler|This comes up again at the end, when there is not enough fuel available to get the satellite all the way to the Moon, but it's supposedly okay because there's enough, given a [[Heroic Sacrifice]], to make it halfway.}} While it is true that you only need to get something partway to the Moon before the Moon's gravity will carry it the rest of the way in, the distance required is closer to 95%, not halfway.
* [[Younger Than They Look]]: [[Tommy Lee Jones]] is 11 years younger than Donald Sutherland, 17 than Clint Eastwood, and 19 than James Garner, yet is portrayed as being around the same age bracket as them (though he is the youngest member of Team Daedalus). Jones was 54 when starring in a film where there was a [[Running Gag]] of all the leads' old friends having passed away from age and the like.