Like a leaf on the wind firefly movie#
Like a leaf on the wind firefly windows#

Assuming it’s fashioned out of an “average” metal, and given its size, I’d guess it’s around 100-200 pounds (45-90 kg). This is orders of magnitude slower than the hypervelocity impacts that a shuttle deals with, but the spear is thousands of times more massive than a fleck of paint. If Reavers shoot spears slow enough to be dodged (which they do), the spear that kills Wash can’t be moving much faster than a Major League fast-ball, putting the upper limit on speed around 100 miles per hour (45 m/s). To get the general dimensions of the spear that killed Wash, I had to (unfortunately) go back to the scene in question, excruciatingly slowing down an emotional moment to be replayed over and over.ĭiving back into Serenity, I used an earlier Reaver chase scene to guesstimate the spear size and speed. A few assumptions and some physics equations would determine if I could save him. Conversely, the Reaver spear that killed Wash was larger, but moving much more slowly.

Like a leaf on the wind firefly windows#

The shuttle windows are tough, to be sure, surviving nearly 1,400 impacts intact over 43 sampled missions, but are they strong enough to save Wash? Tiny particles are elevated to terrifying status because of their ridiculous speeds, not their mass. Any larger than that and we begin making comparisons to sticks of dynamite. Debris measuring five centimeters in diameter packs the punch of a bus collision. An orbiter unlucky enough to be hit by anything much larger than the paint chip that hit STS-92 is in for some trouble. Robert Lee Hotz notes in the Wall Street Journalthat “NASA shuttle engineers have replaced the spacecraft’s debris-pitted windows after almost every flight since since 1981, at a cost of about $40,000 per window.” And such replacements from serious impacts are commonplace. It created more than enough damage to warrant a window replacement. This will bring the numbers in line with the hypervelocity testing that NASA has already conductBased on the size and the speed of the fleck that hit STS-92, I calculated that the window weathered an impact with around 20 Joules of kinetic energy-equivalent to four milligrams of TNT or a decently thrown baseball. But to begin making comparisons, I’ll consider the fleck of paint to be a similarly sized metal sphere. A deformation large enough could eventually cause window failure upon repeated take-offs and re-entries.Īfter engineers examined the crater in the window of STS-92, the shape that best explained the damage was a sort of miniaturized plate. A shuttle window has never been penetrated by a hypervelocity impact, but it doesn’t have to be. The largest impact to a shuttle window occurred when a fleck of paint struck STS-92-a flight to the International Space Station. Shuttles today are outfitted with shielding to prevent such disasters, and feature two-and-a-half inch thick windows-the thickest pieces of glass ever produced in the optical quality for see-through viewing. Tens of thousands of pieces of extraterrestrial trash litter the orbit of Earth, meaning that a shuttle’s final impact could come from an errant hex nut. Our spacecraft obviously must account for this deadly debris. Travelling at a blistering 10,000 meters per second in orbit, the equations deem it lethal.

In terrestrial situations, a speck of paint is less than harmless.

Like a leaf on the wind firefly movie#

If I could prove that a modern shuttle window (assuming that a future window would be even better) could withstand the impact that killed Wash, I could have the ultimate in fanboy closure: the movie is “wrong,” and my version of the story lives on. What if the Reaver spear couldn’t plausibly make it through the forward windows of Serenity? The movie may have been set in the future, but we too have built spacecraft with windows, and they are made to withstand impacts. One of my favorite characters just died, as Firefly died. The immediacy of the violence, and his wife Zoe’s touching reaction, kept my mouth agape well into the next few minutes of the film. Universe,” pilot Hoban 'Wash' Washburne meets his end at the tip of a Reaver spear. Late in Serenity, after crash-landing at the mysterious base of “Mr. It’s a scene that drove me to NASA forums and technical reports, glass manufacturers, my calculator, and eventually to this post. One scene in particular shook me, like the unexpected sight of a Reaver ship. He put in scenes that would only have appeared in a last hurrah like Serenity. But the forced end of Firefly also forced Joss Whedon’s hand. Watching Serenity let me spend a bit more time in the ‘verse, and the film thankfully resolved a number of outstanding loops justwaiting to be closed.