Armageddon: The Movie That Drilled Through Science

The film Armageddon from acclaimed film makers Michael Bay, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Gale Anne Hurd was the break out disaster movie of 1998. With a campy sci-fi premise of sending a bunch of roughneck oil drillers to space to stop a deadly asteroid headed for earth, Armageddon was a fun popcorn movie. The star studded cast included Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke, and
Peter Stormare. Damns thats a hell of a list.

Armageddon helped kick off a slew of themed disaster movies and shared 1998 with another asteroid movie; Deep Impact. While Deep Impact leans more towards scientific accuracy, being that its adapted from Aruthur C. Clarks 1993 novel The Hammer of God, Armageddon however plays fast and loss with their realism.

In the years since the film debuted its premise has been repeatably panned for its outlandishness. Training astronauts to perform drilling operations indeed feel like a much more sensible approach over recruiting deep core drillers as hastily trained astronauts. While I can't argue with that logic; the ranks of NASA astronauts have always contained top engineers and experts in geology. The film doesn't really focus on drilling in any meaningful way in either case. Virtually all the obstacles that the crews face during the mission have little to do with drilling expertise.

Looking past the premise there numerous points in the movie where technical information is inconsistent. In a particular scene the asteroid; "Dottie" is refereed to as a comet, and asteroid as if there where interchangeable. This sets the tone for the films overall approach to Dottie. Since most asteroids aren't solid the way the movie commonly portray them. They're usually more of a loose assemblage of boulders and old ferrous chunks packed together with gravel and sand. All held together by their small collective gravity, So saying Earth's collective nuclear arsenal would be useless isn't reasonable. Dottie is also most likely fully fictional in every sense. It has vague characteristics of an asteroid for plot reasons but visual queues show cometary tails; weird ones but cometary gas clouds none the less.

The U.S Air Force shuttles are also an interesting point. The two shuttle; Freedom and Independence are weirdly launched simultaneously. While it makes for a cool shot...kind of, it also incredible dangerous. If almost anything had gone wrong before or during launch both craft would have been in danger.

Or here in this later shot where they are recklessly maneuvering in close formation...the shuttles are in outer space, there is no reason for them to been within a mile of each other while executing their dangerous landing approach.

The shuttle are said to be made with a "titanium alloy, impenetrable skin" which is like a bad metallurgy joke. Of the long list of titanium alloys, impenetrable isn't in their repertoire. Titanium is known for its light weight in composites but also its fragility, Titanium is relatively brittle as a metal which is why we have shots like this in the film;

The movies other vehicles; the 12-wheeled all-terrain "Armadillos" have their own issues, mounting a drill arm onto it for instance.



While its not totally bizarre for mining gear to be mounted or mobile. Except the crew is only digging a single hole, the drill isn't so overlarge that it would be difficult to move, especially in reduced gravity. The drill site is not far from the shuttle to begin with so mobility seems to be a non-issue. All in all the Armadillos exist mostly as a vestigial plot device, just like the next point. The Armadillos come equipped with a Gatling gun...for some reason.



I know this is a Micheal Bay movie and technically the Armadillo is courtesy of the U.S Air Force...the movie Air Force no the real Air Force, but even so it is a wildly unnecessary piece of equipment to haul up to space. The film even makes a big showing of the drillers going over the Armadillo and ripping out all the extraneous gear on the Armadillos.

The "Russian space station" is also has a funny lack of realism. The station fires its thrusters to simulate gravity, however they do this before docking so the shuttles would have had a much harder time safely matching rotation. The station itself is fundamentally the wrong shape for supporting acceleration induced gravity. Any axis you spin the station on wouldn't generate significant simulated gravity let alone match the movements of the characters inside that station as they're depicted on screen.

To amp up the drama of the ending, the writers splice in a noble sacrifice scenario, by damaging the mission's nuclear payloads remote detonation function. Why is there no backup for this, unclear. Why can't a simple timer be rigged up? They manage to put together a manual detonation trigger but not a simple timer. Odd. The whole mission is predicated on the crew detonating the nuclear bomb at the bottom of a borehole at least 800ft before a critical threshold for the plan to succeed.

That threshold for detonating the bomb is hilariously short. The asteroid is basically in the atmosphere the time the nuke does off he switch. Truth be told I have my doubts that the asteroid could have been diverted by the time it passed the moon. The math of the who scenario isn't mathing

If the asteroid; "Dottie", is the size of Texas as the movie says, then really what would drilling an 800ft hole really accomplish? And it isn't off by a little, 8,000ft wouldn't be much better. Even if the relatively tiny warhead was 100 times as powerful than practical engineer sense says it would be there simple no interpretation of physics that would allow it to displace the asteroids mass to any meaningful degree.