Wow! This thread is like a great big giant bulls eye painted on the broad wall INSIDE the barn! Can't miss. A better question would be "When did Hollywood ever get it right?" Answer:   seldom!

re 2001: A Space Odd-at-sea (or Idiocy, etc.). Well, 2001 AD has come and gone and here we sit Earthside and the only people in space are just a handful of scientist aboard a low orbit laboratory. And yet the movie did get somethings right and for that I applaud them. Sound in space? There is none. No air ( the medium ), no sound! That was one of the most glaring error of the Star Wars series. Ridiculous spaceships that sound like jet fighters for the most part, replete with Doppler effect and all. When they turned they didn't pivot as you would in space, they banked as you would against a wall of thick atmosphere. On and on. The glaring errors are too numerous to mention.

And in regards to human presence in space, do any of you remember the X- program? The Bell X-1 and 2 which showed the way beyond the sound barrier and culminated with the X-15 rocket plane? It was launched from a high flying B-52 and reached a top altitude of 50+ miles? That's IS space brother! It just didn't attain orbital velocity. Do we remember who those pilots were? Sad and why? All because Eisenhower (the original PC'er) didn't want the taint of the military on the fledgling space program. Remember the stupid Vanguard program? Explosion after ridiculous explosion trying to get a US satellite into orbit all the while the Jupiter C and other capable rockets of the military, tried and true, were kept out of the picture. When the ridicule of Ike became so great in the World press, he finally relented and allowed the Jupiter to take our first satellite into orbit. And even then, like a petulant child, Ike continued on with the Vanguard ( not really a civilian-sounding name is it?) throwing millions into it until they finally got it to place an object into orbit. And then the program was scrapped.

Do any of you remember the X-20 "Dyno-Soar"? It was a proposed space shuttle of the early 1960's using technology derived from the X-15. That got scrapped because it was essentially military. Well, this may be big time thread drift but the point I'm trying to make in this little rant is that but for idiots like Eisenhower we WOULD have had a presence on the Moon and possibly even Mars by the mid 90's. Should I mention the moanings from the "Great Society" which decried the exorbitant cost of our Apollo program (which amounted to about $5.oo from every American citizen). No, I thought not. Well, 2001: A Space Odyssey got it RIGHT. It's just that America didn't.