Goofs

On learning many communications satellites have been destroyed, Kowalski remarks, "Half of North America just lost their Facebook." The Internet doesn't use satellites but instead high-speed landlines and microwave relay towers, so Kowalski was either misinformed or making a joke, but either way the Facebook statement is incorrect.

Stone has not yet found the ISS hatch while Kowalkski continually talks to her. Despite knowing she is absolutely out of air, with carbon dioxide poisoning beginning, she stops trying to save herself to listen, and doesn't resume until he finally stops. While he might have been trying to keep her awake, he almost certainly would have had her describe what she was doing in an ongoing commentary, so he could tell if she started drifting off.

Early in the movie, the backdrop is the Nile Valley at night. As the sun rises, the Sinai, to the east, begins to lighten. Soon after, the Sinai is dark again.

When viewing the Earth, the clouds never move, not even the clouds in what should be a swirling hurricane, and the Aurora Borealis never fluctuates.

When Kowalski asks Stone to let go of him because the rope will not hold them both, that could never happen because they are both in the same orbit around the earth. A short simple tug would have brought him back to her. Additionally, once they are drifting away from the ISS, disconnecting from Kowalski would not cause her to rebound back toward the ISS unless another force pulled her back in its direction. At most she would stop when the ropes reach the end of their slack, in which case Kowalsky would also have stopped.

Kowalski estimates they have 90 minutes before the debris field completes an orbit and threatens them again. That's not at all how things in orbit work. The original Russian satellite traveled in its own (presumably low-Earth-orbit). Assume it exploded with great force. The debris by definition would be sent into every direction, the density of objects attenuating by the cube of the distance the debris traveled. It would be very unlikely for any debris to reach the Shuttle, ISS or Chinese space station, or even other satellites. The film shows huge numbers of pieces hitting all at once, despite the debris being the result of multiple collisions separated by time, distance and original orbital track. No matter what, the debris would be in a completely different orbit from the ISS, and would not return.

Houston tells the astronauts that debris from a Russian missile strike on one of their satellites has caused a chain reaction, destroying other satellites, and a huge debris field is heading toward them at high speed. NASA: "Multiple satellites are down and they keep on falling." Kowalski: "Define multiple satellites." NASA: "Most of them are gone. Telecommunications systems are dead." There are a great many problems with this, made all the more important because point is so central to the plot. Communications satellites aren't in low-Earth-orbit ("LEO") like the Shuttle & Hubble Space Telescope. LEOs are at an altitude of roughly 200 miles, whereas communications satellite are in geosynchronous orbits (so-called "Clarke Orbits" in honor of SF author Arthur C. Clarke who first proposed them) about 22,240 miles above the Earth's surface. It is virtually impossible for a non-nuclear explosion to send debris 22,000 miles up even in airless space, never mind put pieces on an intersecting path with satellites that travel above the equator. Secondly, NASA didn't always use communications satellites to reach the Shuttle. If the Shuttle was above America NASA could use microwave, telephone and other methods to send voice to the appropriate ground station, which would then beam the signal directly to the Shuttle (and vice versa). Ground stations in Europe could be reached by NASA via the telephone & data trunk lines under the Atlantic Ocean. In the worst case Ham Radio could even be used to communicate between NASA and the various ground stations. Even if none of this was possible ground stations are manned by communications people during Shuttle flights, and they could have talked directly with the Shuttle even if they had trouble reaching NASA immediately.

However, the array of TRDS comsats, used to free the shuttle from constantly having to be in sight of a ground station, are in LEO to reduce the signal power needed to transmit to them. In fact, it is because they are in LEO that there have to be so many of them, instead of just three.

When Stone removes her spacesuit it is missing two parts, one of them being the Liquid Cooling & Ventilation Garment. The LCVG is what keeps astronauts from overheating and cannot be left out. It also deals with sweat. Without it Stone would risk a heat stroke. She'd also be soaking wet considering her extreme exertion earlier in the movie. We see none of that, only fine little black shorts and a T-shirt.

After Stone emerges from the water, she looks up and sees additional debris streaking across the sky. That debris could have only been from the Chinese space station she inhabited last and it would have all already landed along with her, in fact before her since she parachuted part way down.

There are no side hatches with portholes that open on the descent (re-entry) module in either the Soyuz-TMA or Shenzhou spacecraft. It has three hatches: The ingress and EVA hatch, which is the only way of entering the spacecraft at launch; The internal transfer hatch through the docking port (not installed in all Soyuz crafts), and; The hatch to the descent module. Crew ingress takes place by the crew entering first the orbital module and then climb into the descent module. This is necessary as the descent module is simply too small to allow more than three hatches.

Kowalski is the mission commander, but in space shuttle missions commanders do not carry out extra-vehicular activity outside the shuttle. This is the job of Mission Specialists. Kowalski should have remained inside the shuttle, where he would of course have perished during the accident.

The bodies of the astronauts without pressurizing suits in the space station when exposed to the vacuum quality atmosphere of space would have swollen or become bloated to a significant degree. Here they are depicted as bodies in a normopressure environment, i.e., those in an environment with gravity.

During re-entry, debris is shown zooming past the capsule. This might be regarded as a goof because it's all part of the same Chinese space station and should be re-entering at the same speed. Whilst this might be true initially, the increasing drag from the atmosphere will slow the debris but this will differ according to the size and shape of each object. Larger, denser pieces will not be slowed as much as lighter or less aerodynamic objects.