Goofs

When the Learjet is taking off, Walker is struggling to raise the stairs. But when the plane is seen from in front, the door is fully closed.

Several times a date is shown on the screen when we enter the mission control room. At the same time we hear a voice stating the number of days and hours since mission launch. The dates on the screen don't correspond to the number of days said to have passed between them.

The aircraft that the astronauts are transported in, when leaving to rendezvous with the re-entry capsule, appears to be a Lear 24, since it has two windows on each side of the passenger compartment. The jet that the astronauts escape in and land in the desert is a Lear 23, identifiable by the single window on each side of the passenger compartment. Also, neither plane has a tail number, required by all aircraft, including government aircraft.

When the technician is telling Kelloway about the transmission discrepancy, the pen in Kelloways hand goes from tapping on the desk when viewed from behind, to resting on his lap when viewed from the front.

Near the end of the movie, when one of the helicopters is trying to force the bi-plane down, there are several shots that clearly show Brubaker wearing a large black glove on his left hand. Preceding shots show no gloves.

During the runaway car sequence, the point of view shows the car doing a full 360° turn in the space of street crossing, while supposedly going over 60 miles per hour. This would be like going at freeway speed, and suddenly turning around in a couple of seconds, without spinning out of control . Not even a Formula 1 car has that kind of traction.

The Mars lander used in the film was an identical copy of an Apollo Lunar Module. The LM was designed as a true spacecraft and no aerodynamic design was needed to land on the Moon since the Moon does not have an atmosphere. A lander designed for Mars, however, would have to cope with a substantial atmosphere and would therefore look considerably different from that portrayed in the film.

According to the telemetry board, it appears that the spaceship is orbiting the Earth, when in fact, it is headed to Mars.

Mars gravity is one third that of earth, with a fall taking half the time of that shown in slow motion.

The capsule supposedly returns to Earth on day 259 of the mission. In reality, a round trip to Mars would take about 450 days.

When the astronauts get into the Learjet, they are able to start the aircraft engines right away. In reality, unless it had an auxiliary power unit, they would have needed ground equipment to get the engines started. Edit: A conspiracy involving NASA and the Aerospace Industry would have known the remote location and fitted the plane for the covert mission accordingly, including removal of tail numbers.

Even if there had been no failure and deception in the mission, there is no way that the astronauts could have endured the long way to Mars sitting cramped, side by side, in the module. Edit: As seen in other movies such as Apollo 13, the Apollo crew cabin has space behind and below the seats as well as the tunnel and cabin of the Mars Lander.

Brubaker cuts his left pant leg to make a bandanna, but the suit is intact later. This is because the bandanna is torn from an inner layer of the suit. The outer layer is seen zipped up and rolled back, and comes down when Brubaker stands up.

One might think it illogical for A&A Cropdusting to be located in the desert, since there would be no crops anywhere nearby. The fact is that Dry climate cotton is a huge business in the Texas panhandle, with crops located only 100 miles to the northeast of the Chihuahuan Desert and 125 miles from desert sand - an easy hop for a cropduster.

The space vehicles used in this movie are obviously Apollo equipment. One might think that the heat shield on the Command module could not be separated from it, but under certain extreme conditions it could. A similar heat shield warning occurred during John Glenn's Mercury flight, resulting in the decision to leave the retrorocket pack attached to the craft to help hold the heat shield in place rather than jettisoning it.

Caulfield drives from Houston, TX to Flat Rock, AZ (a distance of about 1100 miles) in only a couple of hours.

In several shots during the desert pursuit, the helicopters appear to hover very close together, either side by side or nose-to-nose. During these shots the rotor blades of the two craft sometimes appear to overlap; if the helicopters were really this close, the blades would collide causing a serious accident. Presumably the apparent closeness is achieved through forced perspective, with one helicopter further away from the camera than the other.

When the sun rises behind the launch pad, it is seen to move to the left as it rises. In the northern hemisphere, the rising sun appears to move to the right. The shot is clearly a sunset played in reverse.

When Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) is driving the out of control car and crashes it through a bus bench, there are pre-cut lines visible in the bench before he crashed through it making it splinter more easily.

Willis mentions that they lost their left landing gear. Brubaker asks if he can retract the remaining landing gear. Scene cuts top left landing gear retracting. You can tell by the direction of flight the camera is pointing backwards and the landing gear retracts toward the mid-line of the plane.

Astronauts going on an extended mission would have had short haircuts at the beginning of the mission, since there are no barbers in space. Their hair is exactly the same from the start of the mission until the end of the mission; an elapsed time of eight months.

The helicopters flying in tandem, searching for the astronauts, should have spread out to cover more area. Also, why do they stop, hover, face one another and then continue? When the pilots are seen on the ground, they are wearing radio headsets which would allow voice communication.

At the end of the scene where Congressman Peaker requests a pair of binoculars for his wife, the woman behind him raises her 35mm camera to her eye to take a picture. The lens cap is still on.

In the press briefing room the Texas flag is upside down.

When giving the tear-filled message to his wife while in zero gravity, Bru's tears run down his cheeks instead of staying in his eyes. The movie camera could see his tear, but the cockpit camera would not since he was furthest away and in shadow.

At the beginning of the movie, the date is given as January 4, yet the NASA announcer says that the time is 6:03 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The United States stopped observing year-round Daylight Saving Time in 1974, and in January reverted to Eastern Standard Time.

The clip of the USS Oriskany (CV-34) shows the Oriskany with a straight flight deck. The Oriskany had a straight flight deck from 1950-1957. In 1957 the ship was rebuilt with a modern angled flight deck. The Oriskany was decommissioned in 1976.

Early in the movie, Dr. Kelloway meets with the three astronauts. There is a shot where Brubaker is on the right and is clearly saying something quite lengthy, yet there is no speech to accompany the movement of his lips.

After Robert Caulfield and Kay Brubaker sit down on the sofa for their second interview, someone's shadow moves behind Kay.

When Caulfield's cars goes over the edge of the bridge, the glass plate protecting the point-of-view camera is visible.

Just before the launch, as a man in a black suit walks across the capsule gantry to open the door and tell the astronauts to "come with me", a crewmember is visible. As the man is opening the capsule door, a crewmember's bare arm is clearly visible on the left helping him open the door. The man is wearing a black suit and the crewmember lending assistance is clearly bare-armed.

When the biplane dives down the cliff face the second time, the shadow of the aircraft filming the scene is visible.

Although there are semi-arid areas in the state of Texas, none are within 300 miles of Houston and thus they are 5 to 6 hours driving time at minimum. There's no way that the astronaut and the reporter could drive from a desert area relatively near Houston and arrive at/around the time of the memorial.

Prior to launch, the vice president is sitting in the stands when a NASA official comes over and gives him and his wife some binoculars. In the background you can see a mountain. There are no mountains in Florida.

Caulfield's editor tells him to "get on a plane with his colleagues to fly to Galveston" to investigate a train wreck. Houston is barely 40 minutes driving from Galveston.

Jackson Army Air Base is located near Jackson, Mississippi, which is 350 miles northeast of Houston and 630 miles from Cape Canaveral, and it is not in a desert.

When Caulfield looks at the magazines in Alva Leacock's apartment, there is a close up of the address label. The ZIP code is 80144. This is not a Houston ZIP code. All ZIP codes in Houston start with 77.

When reporter Robert Caulfield tells his editor about NASA technician Elliott Whitter's disappearance, he says that Alva Leacock claims to have been living in what he knows to be the other man's apartment "for over a year." Even *if* NASA engaged the connivance of the telephone company to change their own current records, they could not possibly have altered and/or replaced every copy of the telephone directory in the Houston metropolitan area, and just a handful would not only put the lie to Leacock's claim, they would also document Whitter's existence.

As they escape in the jet, traffic is visible on a major highway behind them. As the goal is to be seen publicly, they could simply follow the highway into a populated area instead of heading off into the desert. Highways would have been clearly visible as they took off and before they got to higher altitude. Note: Belly landing a NASA jet on a highway would have gotten them the exposure they needed.

As the astronauts did not actually land on Mars, no rocks or other samples could be brought back. These would have been eagerly awaited by scientists all over the world, and their absence would be very difficult for the conspirators to explain without the truth being revealed. This may be evidence that the plan all along was for the capsule to be lost during reentry.

There was simply no way that ALL of the evidence of a person's existence could be erased in the manner shown in the film. The NASA technician lived in the same place for at least a year and would have left a sizable footprint across the Houston area. The film proposes within hours of discovering that the technician had released information to the reporter Robert Caulfield, government agents were able to completely remove all evidence of this person's existence.

If nothing else it would be nearly impossible to get all of the residents in the apartment complex to lie about their having seen the person in question, especially if they were in law enforcement or involved in the court system.

The launch is supposed to be in Florida but the astronauts board a jet and fly away, arriving at an abandoned military base in West Texas. It would have taken them hours to get there from Florida. In the movie, they arrive before the spacecraft has even left Earth orbit.

When the astronauts steal the NASA jet not one of them suggests using the plane's radio to let the world know they are alive.

They make the point that the crew are so far away that conversation is not possible due to the round-trip delay, so the President gives them a recorded message to play. However, mission control still responds with "Roger, Capricorn One" when responding to the simulated crew.

All three astronauts were military officers, they would not have long hair as shown.

When Dr. Kelloway is trying to convince the astronauts to take part in the faking of the mission, he says that during the Apollo 17 moon shot, "People were callin' up the network and bitchin' cuz reruns of I Love Lucy (1951) were canceled." However, the Apollo 17 flight took place in December 1972, while "I Love Lucy" reruns had left the CBS network's daytime schedule for general syndication in 1967, more than five years earlier. Furthermore, viewers generally complain to their local affiliates, not the networks directly, anyway. However, Kelloway may well be saying anything he can think of off the top of his head to convince the astronauts to go along with the deception, and figures none of them follows reruns of old television series enough to call him out.