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. 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.
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