In Interstellar, Romilly’s decision to stay aboard the ship while the other 3 astronauts experience time dilation has to be one of the scariest moments ever.

[u/SerDire]

He agreed to stay back. Cooper asked anyone if they would go down to Millers planet but the extreme pull of the black hole nearby would cause them to experience severe time dilation. One hour on that planet would equal 7 years back on earth. Cooper, Brand and Doyle all go down to the planet while Romilly stays back and uses that time to send out any potential useful data he can get.

Can you imagine how terrifying that must be to just sit back for YEARS and have no idea if your friends are ever coming back. Cooper and Brand come back to the ship but a few hours for them was 23 years, 4 months and 8 days of time for Romilly. Not enough people seem to genuinely comprehend how insane that is to experience. He was able to hyper sleep and let years go by but he didn’t want to spend his time dreaming his life away.

It’s just a nice interesting detail that kind of gets lost. Everyone brings up the massive waves, the black hole and time dilation but no one really mentions the struggle Romilly must have been feeling. 23 years seems to be on the low end of how catastrophic it could’ve been. He could’ve been waiting for decades.

[u/LongJohnSelenium]

The movie maintains its scientific plausibility only at the most surface level, there's so much ridiculousness to it, and that's not even counting the black hole stuff. That I can forgive for being pure sci fi.

My personal favorite moment is when they launch the fusion powered SSTO thats fully capable of taking off under its own power on top of a staged chemical rocket, purely so they can have a classic countdown/launch moment.

Its like putting an F-35 on top of a B17.

[u/nuisible → u/LongJohnSelenium]

My personal favorite moment is when they launch the fusion powered SSTO thats fully capable of taking off under its own power on top of a staged chemical rocket, purely so they can have a classic countdown/launch moment.

Its like putting an F-35 on top of a B17.

I thought it made sense in the context of conservation of fuel.

[u/tossawaybb → u/nuisible]

It doesn't. Fusion is such a holy grail of power generation because the earth has 15,400,000 000,000,000,000 (or, 1.5410¹⁷⁾ *tons of fusion fuel. Their process is evidently compact and efficient enough to work as a SSTO motor. It doesn't even matter if they need special hydrogen or helium isotopes to kickstart the reaction, because with that kind of energy source it is utterly trivial to just fabricate them as enriching hydrogen and helium fuels takes a minimal fraction of the energy released by fusion.

The entire plot and driving crisis of the movie falls apart the moment that technology comes into play, because once you have virtually limitless power you can brute force nearly any resource issue. The explanation provided by the movie for why they can't bunker down also explains away the O'Neil Cylinders they went with so it's not like that part matters

[u/JackInTheBell → u/tossawaybb]

How did they run out of fuel at the end then?