- it takes a huge rocket to launch the small shuttle into space from Earth, but the shuttle can land and then orbit a planet with atmosphere and higher gravity, by itself.
- everybody is shocked that the pilot will aerobrake on a planet with atmosphere (gasp! are you insane?!). The side effect of having an atmosphere on a planet is that you don't need to burn as much fuel for decelerating to land, you can let the air slow you down. They then show the aerobraking as a fabulous u-turn at low altitude. Aerobraking happens anyway when you have atmosphere. The term usually refers to using the shuttle's lift to keep it as high as possible for as long as possible, else it will hit the thick atmosphere too fast and either burn up or decelerate as fast as a car hitting a tree.
- the waves are impossible. I am not going to waste my time explaining why.
- my favorite: the guys land on a planet which is close to the black hole, so close that time is changed for them. But at the same time, the guy which stays in orbit around the planet spends an equal time as the ones back on Earth. Seems logical? Well, unless he is orbiting the L2 Lagrange Point of that planet, he is going to (guess what) ORBIT the planet, which means that at times he will be closer to the black hole that the planet itself. Meaning that under no circumstance time would be "unchanged for him". However, if you try to imagine just how much time would pass for him, your head will begin to hurt, and you will realize why the planet itself would probably disintegrate if it were exposed to such variance in space-time.
- the spinning ship: ok, I'll ignore the fact that the vessel they use for propulsion is not in the center of mass, fine. But for an explosion to propel the ring (now damaged) in a perfect spin is.... idiotic. More likely, the vessel would've spun on multiple axis, making docking virtually impossible.
- So they stop the spinning but now they go from being in orbit of a planet, to being sucked in by the black hole. Uhmmm... long story short, black holes don't suck. Their gravity wells, at reasonable distances, act exactly the same as for any object of the same mass. The closer you orbit it, the faster you go. What makes a black hole a black hole, is the fact that at some point, your orbiting speed becomes the speed of light (at the event horizon). The same applies to freefalling into it (actually colliding with an object is sort of orbiting it with a very pointy orbit). You gather speed until the front of your ass goes through your mouth because of space-time dilation. And you're not even close to the event horizon. Now here's the problem. Let's suppose that you do start to fall into a black hole and you want to avoid going through it. Where do you use your engines? Answer: as far away from it as possible. Let's suppose you do want to hit it, where do you use your engines? Answer: again, as far away as possible. The only reason why you'd burn your engines near a black hole is to take advantage of the Oberth effect at high speeds. So even IF they were now going towards the black hole, due to messing up their orbit speed,
- you don't escape a black hole by burning your engines close to it, because you're not a Chuck Yeager avoiding the cornfield, you're not Nelson at the helm avoiding the lighthouse, you're not a baloonist using the heater to avoid a freaking tree, all the while dropping sandbags to get more altitude. What's worse, because the black holes don't suck, the brave hero and braver robot would now be stranded in a highly elliptical orbit, and would have to wait a few years to arrive at the other end so that they could change their orbit to hit the damn thing.
- last one, how could I forget: "Oh noes, my vessel is bombarded by black-hole meteors somehow travelling against the laws of physics, thank god I'm not outside, uuuu Eject!!!"
